
The Great War 

SIX SERMONS 



BY= 



WASHINGTON GLADDEN 



What the War Must Bring 

The Futility of Force 
Is Christianity a Failure? 
What Will End the War? 

Get a New Idea 
The Church and Peace 




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in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/greatwarsixsermoOOglad 



The Great War 



Six Sermons 

by 

Washington Gladden 



What the War Must Bring 
The Futility of Force 
Is Christianity a Failure? 
What Will End theWar? 
Get a New Idea 
The Church and Peace 



McClelland and company 

COLUMBUS, o. 



Of- 



yr^^^ 



These sermons were preached in the First Congregational 
Church, Columbus, Ohio, each on the date appended to it. The 
phases of feeling of the days on which they were spoken may 
be reflected in them. If some things are said more than once 
it is to be hoped that they may prove to be things which need 
reiteration. They are the utterance of a strong faith in the 
Gospel of Jesus Christ, and of a great hope that this war may 
help the nations and the churches to see that it is true. 

W. G. 

Columbus, Ohio, Jan. 10, 1915. 



What The War Must Bring 



For the body is not one member, but many. . . . And 
whether one member suffereth, all the members suffer with 
it; or one member is honored, all the members rejoice with 
it— I Cor. XII: 14. 26. 

Paul's primary reference is to the Christian society, the 
church, the body of which Jesus Christ is the head. But the law 
of solidarity which he lays down is of universal application. 
Man is a social animal, and this is the law to which all his asso- 
ciations are adjusted. The body of humanity is not one mem- 
ber, but many. We are so inter-related that the welfare of each 
is the concern of all. Human life can only be lived in organic 
relations in which gains and losses, pains and pleasures, joys 
and sorrows are shared; in which, if one member suffer, all 
the members suffer with it ; and if one member be honored all the 
members rejoice with it. This is not because of any social 
contract in which, as Jean Jacques figured it, we have got to- 
gether and agreed that it should be so, but because we are so 
made that it must be so; we cannot live peaceably or prosper- 
ously on any other basis. We have the power, indeed, to ignore 
and disobey the law, but that is only the power to bring loss 
and misery and defeat upon ourselves. We are members one of 
another; that is the biological fact; and as all the members of 
the body co-operate for the welfare of the body, and as each 
finds its own health and strength in the common life to which 
it contributes, so do we, in all our social relations, seek the 
good of life by multiplying and sharing the things we have in 
common. It is possible, of course, for the feet to batter and 
bruise each other, and for the hands to claw the cheeks, and 
for the teeth to bite the tongue, but that kind of insanity is not 
prevalent ; nobody thinks that anything is to be gained by strife 
among the members of the body. Each one of us is a walking 
illustration of the law of social co-operation. 

The principle of solidarity reveals itself in concentric and 
enlarging circles of human relationship. It begins, of course, 
in the family, which is the primary social unit. Every normal 
household rests upon the principle of mutuality. The family 
good is a common good ; each contributes to it what he can and 
receives from it what he needs. The children begin by receiving 
much and giving little, but they end, if the family holds together 
as it should, by giving much and receiving little. The problem 
is to divide and apportion ability and need so that each shall 
have the consciousness of giving what he can to the common 
good, and of receiving from it what he needs. No member of 
the family, grandparent, parent, husband, wife, son or daughter, 
brother or sister, ever dreams of levying tribute for his own 



bienefit on the contributions of the others and increasing his 
share by lessening theirs ; and no one has any doubt but that his 
interests will always be considered and his wants provided for, 
if there is enough in the common store to meet his need. This 
is the law of the normal household ; and it gives us the principle 
which is intended to govern all associations of human beings 
with one another. We could not conceive in a normal family, of 
some members robed in silk and feasting on luxuries, while 
others were clad in rags and munching crusts. If riches are 
there all have them ; if poverty arrives the burden is borne by all. 
Sickness cannot come into the home without laying its load of 
solicitude and fear on the hearts of all its inmates. If one 
member suffer all the members suffer with it. 

As we go out from the home to the larger circles of rela- 
tionship the ties that bind are, of course, much loosened and 
the sense of solidarity becomes fainter. Yet even in the primi- 
tive communities there is a real consciousness of unity, and a 
strong feeling of interdependence. The typical country school 
district in which some of us once lived, was made up of people 
whose individualism was strongly developed ; nevertheless, there 
was much conscious community of interest among these isolated 
neighbors. They exchanged work in hoeing and haying and 
harvesting and logging; a barn-raising was a social festival; 
butchering-time opened the door to the sharing of edibles; and 
serious sickness or death brought the whole neighborhood into 
close sympathy. Especially when the common epidemics pre- 
vailed we were made aware of our common heritage of suffering ; 
somehow the measles and the mumps found their way from 
house to house through those scattered populations. 

The people came to feel more or less keenly that they were 
members one of another and that the fortune or misfortune of 
each was the concern of all. There is still much to be desired in 
the strengthening of that social bond in the rural communities — 
much that the rural church ought to do, and often sadly fails 
to do, because it is a house divided against itself, and by its 
senseless and wicked divisions has unfitted itself for the unifying 
work in which it ought to be the leader. 

When we rise to the great municipalities, the conscious- 
ness of solidarity is sometimes present; you can think of cities 
in which it is a powerful influence. We could wish that there 
were more of it in most of our cities. We could wish that in our 
own city and in every American city, there might be more of 
the feeling that found utterance on the lips of so many of the 
Hebrew singers when they poured out their hearts in passion- 
ate praise of Jerusalem; rejoicing in its strength and beauty, 
praying for its peace, calling down the blessings of heaven 
on all who loved it and sought its prosperity. I can think of 
no good reason why the city where he lives should not be as dear 
to the heart of every good citizen, as Jerusalem was to the 
psalmists of the olden time. 

But the solidarity of the modern city is not so much a 
sentiment as a practical everyday reality. We do not feel our 



unity so deeply as well we might, but our interdependence is 
the working principle of our existence. A very large share of 
the good of life, in a city like this, is a common good. The 
streets and the parks and the levees and the street lights and 
the waterworks and the public buildings and the schools are all 
common property, the provisions for transportation and for 
heating are under our common control; in all this vast system 
of ownership and operation we are business partners, and the 
government of our city in all its phases is largely a business 
enterprise in which we are co-operators. That is what democ- 
racy means — many members in one body. 

In our economic and industrial interests also, we are greatly 
dependent on one another. The prosperity of each class pro- 
motes the welfare of every other class; when all the mills and 
factories are running and the wage-workers are employed, trade 
is brisk, the builders prosper, salaried people find employment; 
all share in the abundance; but if dearth or misfortune comes 
to any branch of industry, the injury is felt, more or less, by 
all the rest. 

So of the public health. Each of us is interested that all his 
fellow citizens should be sound and well; for each able-bodied 
citizen has the power to make the contribution due from him 
to the commonwealth; while invalids are liable to be a charge 
upon the common purse, and contagions spread. Nothing is 
more democratic than disease; it is no respecter of persons or 
classes; if diphtheria is entertained in the slums it is quite apt 
to go calling, without invitation, on the boulevards. 

Thus it appears that even in the larger civic groups, we find 
ourselves inextricably bound together, members of one body, 
partners in gain and loss, in pleasure and pain, sharers of one 
another's hopes and fears and joys and sorrows. This is not 
the result of any deliberate purpose or arrangement of our 
own, it is the simple consequence of the fact that we are social 
beings, members of one body. 

It is hardly needful to argue that the nation also is an 
organism, in which all classes are united by the same vital bond ; 
so that no class or group can isolate itself from the rest and 
try to live at the expense of the rest, or in disregard of the wel- 
fare of the rest, without bringing disorder and disaster into 
the life of the nation. Only when all groups and classes clearly 
discern and joyfully recognize the bond that unites them to the 
commonwealth, and study and strive to make the contribution 
which is due from them to the common life, does the nation 
dwell in peace and security. 

Quite dimly, as yet, does this tremendous truth become 
visible to the whole people; there are some who see it clearly; 
to most it appears as in a blurred mirror, darkly; but recent 
years have been steadily making it more and more manifest, 
and the day will come when it will be realized that in the nation, 
as truly as in the family, we are members one of another, and 
that the life of the nation must be so organized that the law 
of sharing shall govern all our relations to one another. 



Having reached this stage in our moral development, it has 
been commonly assumed that we were at the end of the course. 
Within the life of the nation, it was admitted, the law of reci- 
procity ought to rule; beyond the frontiers there was no such 
obligation. In its intercourse with other nations, each nation 
would, of course, look out for itself. I remember very well when 
Lord IPalmerston, the English premier, distinctly stated in Par- 
liament, that in the settlement of an international difficulty 
England would, of course, be governed wholly by what she be- 
lieved to be for her interest. I have heard eminent authorities 
in international law lay down the same principle — that nations 
could recognize no higher law than the law of self-interest. 
This, of course, makes every nation the natural rival and the 
presumptive enemy of every other nation, and puts the whole 
world on a war basis. Every nation feels justified in strength- 
ening its own power, not only in entire disregard of the welfare 
of other nations, but at their expense. A strong nation may 
invade, overpower, oppress, enslave a weaker nation, if she can 
do so without exciting the cupidity of other nations stronger 
than herself. The ultimate appeal in international relations is 
the right of the strongest. 

This has been, practically, the basis on which the affairs 
of nations have been settled throughout the centuries. Of late, 
however, it seems to have begun to dawn on the minds of 
thoughtful people that this is not a good basis of international 
relationship. A new note has been heard in the councils of 
the publicists. It has been recognized that there are human ob- 
ligations and responsibilities that cannot be ignored. Our own 
government has, on one occasion at least, distinctly announced 
that the United States proposed to be governed in its relations 
with other nations by the Golden Rule. Thus it appears that 
we have witnessed the dawn of the day when it will appear to 
all men that the law of solidarity governs all human kind ; that 
nations as well as individuals and social classes, are members 
one of another; that nations and races are bound together by 
the fact of brotherhood ; that the supreme good of humanity is a 
common good ; that no nation can win real and lasting prosper- 
ity at the expense of other nations ; that it is as true of the whole 
human family as of the group around the household hearth, that 
if one member suffers all the members share in the suffering, 
that if one member is honored all the members share in the 
honor. 

That such is the right relation of the peoples and tribes 
that dwell on the face of the earth is beginning, I say, to be 
understood by those who walk in the light of this new day. 
The past two decades have witnessed a marvelous growth of this 
sentiment ; hundreds of peace organizations have been spreading 
the truth respecting the true basis of international relationships, 
and a great multitude of men of good will have been preaching 
the gospel of peace. 

What has brought about this change in the direction of 
thought? It is due in part, no doubt, to the steadily rising 



ethical conceptions of men; to a better understanding of the 
fundamental truths of the Christian morality. The expectation 
of a day when all the people of the world shall live in peace and 
unity is, indeed, one part of the great heritage which has come 
down to us from the Hebrew prophets; while He who came to 
fulfill their hopes was proclaimed by an angelic chorus, who 
sang of Peace on Earth and Good Will to Men. Not always 
has his church given to this truth the centrality which belongs 
to it; yet it has never been wholly obscured, and in these last 
days it has been gaining power over the hearts of men. The 
great truth of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of 
man has been emerging from the theological fog and murk in 
which it has so long been hidden, and its implications in the 
world-order have begun to appear. 

But there are other and more palpable reasons why this 
idea of the solidarity of humanity has been gaining a place in 
the thoughts of men. In those studies of "the New World-Life"* 
which we have been conducting during the present summer, we 
have seen what tremendous forces have been at work within the 
last century to change the whole drift of human destiny. We 
have seen how, almost within the memory of some of us, the 
main currents of human tendency have been reversed; how it 
was true, up to a hundred years ago, that all the tendencies were 
toward the dispersion and isolation of peoples, — to drive them 
apart and make them strangers and foes to one another; 
whereas the prevailing tendencies now are bringing them to- 
gether into neighborhood and acquaintance. The marvelous 
improvements in transportation and communication have swept 
aside the barriers that held people apart; "steam," it has been 
said, "annihilated nine-tenths of distance and electricity the 
remainder. Isolation is, therefore, becoming impossible, for the 
world is now a neighborhood." The swift ships flying from 
one shore to another weave the ties that bind land to land. 
Commerce is spreading its vast net and gathering into it peoples 
of every clime and color. The tribes that once would either 
have fled from each other or would have fallen upon each other 
with clubs or spears, now traffic with one another in the market 
places of the world. The volume of these world exchanges, 
v/hen compared with those of former days is tremendous. "It 
would require," says Dr. Strong, "a fleet of 300 vessels such as 
the Greeks and Phoenicians propelled with oars to carry the 
cargo of a single modern steamer; and it would take from 
375,000 to 500,000 camels to transport the wheat which during 
the busy season passes over any one of our great east and west 
railways in a single day. . . . It is evident also that the 
facilities of a world commerce are rapidly increasing. In 1840, 
the total foreign commerce of the world was less than $3,000,- 
000,000; now that of the United States alone reaches $4,000,- 
000,000; while that of Great Britain is now greater than was 
the combined commerce of all nations in 1850, "f 



*"Our World," pp. 20. 25. 
f'Our World," by Josiah Strong. 



So, too, we have developed a vi^orld-industry. The people of 
all the earth are working together, working for one another. 
Even in my boyhood every family provided by its own industry 
for most of its own wants; now far the larger part of every 
family's needs is supplied by other labor — much of it by the 
labor of men and women on the other side of the world, while 
the product of the same family's labor may go to the ends of the 
earth. People all round the world are laboring to supply your 
larder, to replenish your wardrobe, to furnish your dining room 
and your bed room ; while goods made in Columbus are marketed 
in Europe and Asia and Africa and Australia and the islands 
of the sea. We are directly interested in the thrift and prosper- 
ity of black people and white people and yellow people and 
brown people of many lands who cannot speak our language; 
and they are glad when our crops are good and there is a demand 
for their products. 

So the capital of every country flows out into other countries 
and seeks investment there. American capitalists, we are told, 
have spent $300,000,000 on subsidiary factories in Canada; 
and have risked no less than a thousand millions in the develop- 
ment of Mexico. It is estimated that Americans have spent 
$100,000,000 in planting factories in the Old World. France 
is said to have loaned $15,000,000,000 to industries in other 
nations, and Great Britain nearly as much. 

These are only instances of that wonderful development 
which has been bringing the people of all the earth into neigh- 
borhood and intercourse and community of interest. Most of 
this has taken place during my life-time. I have watched with 
my own eyes the operation of the movements and forces which 
have been drawing the nations into this mighty co-operative 
relationship. I have seen the foundations laid of what must 
be the federation of the world. There is no idealism about this, 
no sentimentalism ; this is nobody's dream; this is business. 
And this means, of course, that there must be for this world- 
industry and world-commerce and world-finance a world-peace; 
nations which are so vitally linked together must be friends. 
Each depends for its welfare and prosperity on the welfare and 
prosperity of all the rest. They are members one of another. 
Their interests are common. It is just as idiotic for them to 
make war on one another, as it would be for your own two feet 
to kick each other, or your two fists to hammer each other or 
your eyes to blockade your ears, or your chin to try to knock 
out your nose. And this has been brought about by no treaties 
or conventions or agreements, but by the silent and resistless 
operation of social forces resident in human nature. Reverently 
we may say this is God's work. It is his way of bringing the 
nations together. 

But while the world, by these mighty movements, has been 
steadily building up this vast community of interests and initiat- 
ing these great co-operations, other agencies have been at work 
to check and thwart the great consummation. The tradition of 
isolation and antagonism dies hard. There are historical resent- 



ments and jealousies and suspicions that array the nations 
against each other. "Nations," says Dr. Strong, "have long 
looked on each other as necessary rivals, if not as natural ene- 
mies. They have sought to live separate lives; they have pur- 
sued selfish and, therefore, short-sighted policies; they have 
plotted and warred to weaken each other ; they have set up arti- 
ficial barriers to commerce ; they have erected national instead of 
universal standards of ethics, and have honored national big- 
otry as patriotism." It is hard to unlearn these age-long antipa- 
thies and egoisms. And I think we must say that national pol- 
icies, as a rule, have hitherto been guided by these antipathies, 
rather than by those new and wonderful tendencies to unity 
and co-operation whose movements we have been tracing. The 
rulers of the world have been far more intent on the aggrandize- 
ment of the separate nationalities than on the common welfare. 
They have given a greatly exaggerated attention to the things 
that make for separation and antagonism and much less thought 
to the things that make for unity. Instead of opening wide the 
gates to peaceful intercourse with other peoples they have been 
building forts and fleets and gathering immense armies and 
armaments for warfare with their neighbors. 

All this has been done, of course, in flagrant defiance of 
that world-wide movement which we have been considering. 
Not in conscious defiance, perhaps; but surely in stupid or sul- 
len unconsciousness of the existence and the influence of the 
secular forces which have been welding the nations together. 
If there had been even a dim recognition of the truth that they 
are members one of another ; that the supreme good of humanity 
is and must be a common good, no such constant and stupendous 
preparations for mutual destruction could have been thought of. 

Three weeks ago, any philosophic student of world problems 
would have been entitled, at least, to the hope that the great fact 
of human solidarity had so far impressed itself upon the mind 
of the world, that the rulers of the world would have been in- 
clined to respect it and adjust their policies with reference to 
it. Of course, there were the armaments, and it is hard for 
people with such tools in their hands to keep from using them; 
and there were the traditional enmities and grudges and all 
that is tinder too easily ignited; but here were the great facts 
of mutual interest, of world-wide inter-relationship and interde- 
pendence; new facts in the world's history; shining facts, stu- 
pendous facts, the like of which the world had never before 
confronted. Was it not possible that due weight would be 
given to these and that the rulers might find some way of com- 
posing their differences without resorting to war? 

Alas, that hope was too sanguine. It gave too large credit 
to the intelligence and sagacity of the rulers of the world ; it 
underrated the bigotries and stupidities of kings and councils 
and chancelleries; it failed to estimate at its full value the 
strength of the obsession of militarism. 

For here are all the great nations of Europe suddenly 



plunged into a conflict which bids fair to be the most destructive 
and disastrous ever waged upon this planet. 

And for what? Had either of these warring nations made 
any actual encroachment upon the rights or liberties of those 
with whom it is now in deadly grapple? I do not hear of any. 
Austria charged Servia with murdering her grand duke; but 
the charge was not proven, and Servia was ready to make all 
possible reparation. The real reason was Austria's fear that 
Servia was growing too strong, and her determination to humble 
her and keep her under. France had made no attack on Ger- 
many nor Germany on France, but each has been terribly 
afraid that the other would become too powerful. Some of 
these fighting powers have been dragged into the conflict greatly 
against their wishes and for them we must have sympathy; 
but the fundamental reason for the war is the mutual jealousy 
and fear of these nations ; their assumption that each is the 
natural enemy of the other; their determination to seek their 
own national aggrandizement with no regard for the welfare 
of the rest. 

What are the causes of this war? 

First of all, the lust of fighting, the inheritance of the "ape 
and tiger" which still kennels in human hearts, and now and 
then breaks out in savagery. 

Second, the curse of selfishness which, defying the order of 
nature, arrays the individual or the group against the common- 
wealth, and sets the members to devouring one another instead 
of serving the needs of the body. 

Third, the rule of privileged classes, who have become in- 
capable of taking the world-view of national obligations, and 
insist on the traditions and policies which they have inherited. 
"We are face to face with a frightful calamity," says a London 
journal of week before last, "not because the people of Europe 
desire war, still less because they have a hand in making it, but 
because kings and emperors, ministers and diplomats, have 
allowed themselves to think of policies and frontiers rather than 
of the lives of men and the happiness of women and children. 
The people of Europe have no quarrel with each other, and no 
enmity against each other which has not been artificially created 
and fostered." 

Fourth, in the words of the same witness, "the present 
crisis is the natural consequence of allowing national hatreds to 
accumulate, and of piling up armaments instead of seeking to 
remove the causes of misunderstanding between nations, and 
cultivating the influences which make for peace. War will not 
remove these misunderstandings, but only intensifies them." 

What will be the gain of the war to the warring nations? 
There will be no gain, absolutely none. I defy any man to sug- 
gest any rational probability of advantage to any one of them. 
Every one of them will be impoverished, crippled, burdened with 
enormous debts ; every one of them will emerge from the war in 
worse condition than when it entered it. If any one of them 
should gain such an advantage as to threaten to become a domi- 



nant power, that very advantage would prove to be a millstone 
about her neck, for it would promptly lead to new combinations 
in which all her defeated rivals and most of her allies would be 
arrayed against her. That would mean a later struggle in which 
her yoke would be broken. 

What will the war bring to the people of these distracted 
countries? Alas, it is too easy to tell. It will bring, it must 
bring, if it continues long, such a deluge of disasters as the sun 
has never looked down upon. Through all those fertile valleys, 
miles on miles of trenches filled with dead men, — the young men, 
the strong men of all these countries — hundreds of thousands of 
them cut down in the flower of their manhood ; homes desolated, 
widows bearing a life-long sorrow; mothers weeping for their 
boys who will never return ; little children orphaned and hungry 
and homeless; cripples filling the streets for many a year and 
eating the bread of charity ; industries ruined ; workless throngs 
besieging the gates of closed factories ; many a beautiful city and 
town laid waste, palaces and cottages in ruins, the instruments of 
industry wrecked and thrown to the junk-pile, the monuments of 
architecture and treasures of art mutilated or destroyed. From 
how many pale lips shall the wail of the old prophet be heard : 
"Upon the land of my people shall come up thorns and briers ; 
yea upon all the houses of joy in the joyous city; for the palace 
shall be forsaken; the populous city shall be deserted; the hill 
and the watch tower shall be for dens forever — a joy of wild 
asses, a pasture of flocks." This is what war means, what it 
always means: waste, want, destruction, desolation, poverty, 
misery, sorrow and death — death in its most frightful forms, 
with its most ghastly circumstances. All this war must always 
bring, but this war, with its immense forces and its titanic 
enginery of destruction will undoubtedly show us consequences 
which will make all the previous records of carnage and desola- 
tion look small and pale. 

All this cost the nations might afford to pay if they were get- 
ting for it some gain of freedom or welfare. But is there any 
such prize set before these combatants ? I do not hear of it. 

And yet, I doubt not this war will bring to the world at 
large some great gains — ^gains not sought by any of these com- 
batants — gains not desired by most of them, — ^gains won in spite 
of them all. 

It will bring, in the first place, such a demonstration, not 
only of the horrors of war, but of its futility, its stupidity as the 
arbiter of international relationships, that there will be a mighty 
revulsion against war, and we shall soon realize that we have 
seen the beginning of the end of it. 

It will bring home to us, also, in the sufferings which we 
shall undergo through the rupture of all these industrial rela- 
tions, and the interruption of human progress and the disloca- 
tion of so much of the order of the world on which we have 
learned to depend, the truth that for this world-industry and 



world-commerce and world-finance and world-friendship we 
must have a world-peace. 

It will bring the kings of this world and their ministers and 
chancellors — those of them especially, who are most responsible 
for this outbreak — to the bar of the world's judgment. It will 
convict them of the most stupendous blunder and the most 
ghastly crime of history. It will demand of them very pointedly, 
what reason they have to offer why they should not have their 
power considerably restricted. It may not insist on discrowning 
them, but it is pretty sure to give them notice that they have 
come into a new world-order, where nations are not plunderers 
of one another, or overlords one of another, but members one of 
another, — in which 

"Each Christian nation shall take upon her 
The law of the Christian man in vast ; 

The crown of the getter shall fall to the donor. 

And last shall be first, while first shall be last. 

And to love best shall still be to reign unsurpassed." 

Does this weakening of hereditary and absolute authority 
mean an enlargement of democracy? It cannot mean anything 
else. 

And is the democracy ready to assume this added power? 
Alas, I fear not. It will make many grievous mistakes, I am 
sure. But of one thing we may be confident. It will never be 
possible for this democracy, in its maddest moments, to make 
such a colossal and criminal blunder as these lords of privilege 
are making now. It will never have, it can never obtain, the 
power to do mischief which the great ones of the earth are now 
exercising. So that we may await whatever changes may come 
in the world-order with some measure of equanimity. 

What is the war bringing to this nation? Doubtless some 
are looking for improved industrial conditions and increased 
prosperity. That is not a reasonable expectation. Some special 
industries may be stimulated ; in the shifting of the currents of 
trade some fortunes may be made ; but on the whole, it will go 
the other way. Many industries will be crippled. Many men 
will be out of work, prices will be higher, we must be ready for 
close economies. It is to be hoped that the agony will not be pro- 
longed, but we must remember that the nations of the earth are 
members of one another, and we have got to take some share of 
the suffering and loss which this war will bring. Our customers, 
over seas, are going to be impoverished, and it must affect our 
trade. In some ways, as I said, there will be gains, but on the 
whole we must be ready for losses. A good share of the world's 
wealth is going to be wiped out by this war, and the loss will be 
widely distributed. The immediate rise of prices bringing dis- 
tress to the poorest is an indication of what will come. For 
while these conditions have, no doubt, been aggravated by con- 
scienceless extortionists, they are in large degree the effect of 

10 



natural causes ; for a considerable part of the world's supply of 
the necessaries of life comes from these warring nations whose 
industries are now crippled. 

One remote consequence of the war to this nation may be 
somewhat serious. When it is over we are likely to see a greatly 
increased immigration to this country. Unless there are speedy 
social readjustments over there, millions from all those warring 
nations will turn their faces westward. That will bring us heavy 
tasks and responsibilities. It looks as though our democracy 
were likely to be much less of a sinecure than we have been in- 
clined to make it. I incline to the belief that this new invasion 
will bring to us much of the best of those populations ; that there 
will be in it a great deal of very good material for citizenship ; 
but there will be a loud call for intelligent and clean and conse- 
crated leadership in welcoming these multitudes to our shores, 
and guiding them into the ways of useful occupation. 

Such, then, are some of the consequences which we may con- 
fidently expect to follow this fearful war. It will bring waste 
and woe and desolation, — a heavier retribution I fear than the 
world has ever suffered ; and such it ought to bring, for it is the 
blackest crime the world has ever committed. But after the 
night comes the morning, always, always ! Out of this agony the 
world will win peace and liberty and plenty and good will. It is 
a heavy price that we are paying for good that might have been 
ours by just wishing for it and taking it; but perhaps the day 
will come — not in my time, I hope in yours — when it will be plain 
that it is worth all it has cost. 

That mighty secular movement which we traced, at the be- 
ginning, will go forward ; all the war-lords cannot stop it. Can 
you stay the morning star in his course? The nations will be 
drawn closer and closer in bonds of amity and helpful inter- 
course ; we shall discover that we are not foes, but members one 
of another. 

"Nation with nation, land with land, 

Unarmed shall dwell as comrades free; 

In every heart and brain will throb 
The pulse of one fraternity." 

Yes, it will come. It was never so near as it is today. It 
seems that the world needed one more demonstration of the 
futility of war, and the war-lords have undertaken to furnish 
one. Evidently it will be conclusive. There will be need of no 
further argument. Do not sneer at the Palace at The Hague ; we 
shall have abundant use for it ere long, as the meeting place of 
the humbled and contrite nations when they gather to reduce 
the armaments and to prepare the ways of peace. And some 
of you will be here in the good day not far off, to hail 

11 



"The coming of the end, 
The last long Sabbath day of time, 
When peace from heaven shall descend 
Like heaven's own light, on every clime! 
When men in ships far out at sea 

Shall hear the happy nations raise 
The songs of peace and liberty, 

The chant of overflowing praise. 
Mankind shall be one brotherhood ; 

One human soul shall fill the earth, 
And God shall say, 'The world is good 
As in the day I gave it birth.* " 

Aug. 16, 1914. 



12 



The Futility of Force 



For though we walk in the flesh we do not war according to the 
flesh; for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh 
hut mighty before God to the casting down of strongholds. 
II Cor. X: 3,4. 

The world is always interested to hear from its great war- 
riors how they won their battles. Paul, the apostle, is one of the 
greatest of the world's heroes. It is doubtful whether any man 
who has stood upon this planet (save the Master by whom and 
for whom Paul lived) has waged more effective warfare against 
the evil of the world than Paul waged. With the sword of the 
Spirit, which is the word of truth, he has marched down the 
centuries, conquering and to conquer. It is certain that he is 
one of the authors whose writings have been most widely read 
and most broadly influential. The hand which penned the 
twelfth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, and the twelfth 
and thirteenth and fifteenth chapters of First Corinthians, and 
the Epistles to the Philippians and the Ephesians, has probably 
done more to shape human destiny than any hand which has 
wrought in human affairs since Paul's work was finished. Paul 
always thought of himself as a warrior. The soldierly qualities 
are those he always claims. The campaign in which he is 
enlisted is the conquest and subjugation of the kingdoms of this 
world by the Kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. 
But he always takes pains to make it very plain that the warfare 
in which he is enlisted is a very different kind of warfare from 
that in which the armies of kings and emperors are engaged. 
"Not against flesh and blood," he says, is he ever contending. 
He is not fighting to hurt any man ; no man is ever maimed or 
weakened by any blow that he strikes; he is fighting to destroy 
the evils that prey upon human life ; he is fighting to break the 
fetters that cripple and enslave men. 

But the one great truth on which he constantly dwells is 
the truth that the weapons of his warfare are not the weapons 
on which the Roman legionary relies. He has absolutely no 
use for the instruments of physical force. Neither with fists, 
nor clubs, nor spears, nor swords, nor with any of the enginery 
of physical destruction does he ever deal. "We walk in the 
flesh," he says; we are just ordinary human beings; we claim 
no angelic rank or prerogative; but "we do not war according 
to the flesh"; we have methods of overcoming our adversaries 
which are unlike those employed in ordinary warfare. "For 
the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh [not carnal, as 
the old version has it], but mighty before God to the pulling 
down of strongholds." 

Truth and love, these are the only weapons he ever employs. 

13 



Tell men the truth; get them to see things as they are; sweep 
the fogs of prejudice and tradition out of their brains; bring 
them face to face with reality — that is the first thing, and then 
win their love; get their affections awakened and enlisted in 
some human interest ; draw out their hearts toward the wonder 
and the beauty of the world in which they live, and toward the 
companionships and the needs of the people round about them; 
fill their minds with truth and their hearts with love and you 
have conquered their worst enemies; you have set them free; 
you have won the battle for them. For the worst enemies of 
men are ignorance and darkness and prejudice and hatred and 
suspicion and ill-will ; when these are overcome and driven forth, 
they have entered into life. 

Such, then, is the nature of the warfare in which this good 
soldier was engaged, and such were the weapons with which he 
won his victories. The point to be emphasized is the superiority, 
the greater effectiveness, of these spiritual weapons. The 
weapons of our warfare are not physical, but they are mighty 
before God, to the pulling down of strongholds. 

The only possible justification of warfare is the destruction 
of the evil of the world. It cannot be justified as a means of 
plunder, of aggression, of self-aggrandizement, of selfish con- 
quest ; for all such purposes it is an accursed thing. 

It can only be tolerated when it promises to take away 
oppression, to break fetters, to release captives, to banish 
ignorance and darkness and misery. It may be that such evils 
are sometimes worse than the evils of war ; that war with carnal 
weapons may be chosen as a means of escape from such evils. 

But there is always the question which kind of weapons 
will be most effective in overcoming this evil of the world. In 
this good fight which weapons are mightiest, the weapons of 
force and fear or the weapons of truth and love? 

I will not discuss at this time the policy of non-resistance; 
whether force is ever to be used in resisting and overcoming 
evil. Nice questions of casuistry emerge when that question 
is raised. I will admit, for the sake of my present argument, 
that emergencies arise in which force must be used. I am only 
inquiring today which is the stronger power; on which should 
we put our main reliance? Do we not often depend on carnal 
weapons, when the weapons that are not carnal would be far 
more effective? Are there not, indeed, a great many cases in 
which we insist on the use of physical force, or what is equiva- 
lent to physical force — on coercion of some kind — when coercion 
is absolutely futile, and when the only weapons should be the 
weapons of truth and love? 

Is it not true, in short, that the use of physical force in 
contending against the evil of this world is enormously over- 
done, and that the strength of the moral forces is pitifully under- 
rated, even by those who profess to put their trust in them ? 

It is a good time to consider this question because we are 
facing the most gigantic illustration of this foolishness that 
has ever been presented to the human mind. 

14 



The central evil of the world has always been the disposi- 
tion of the peoples to prey upon one another and plunder one 
another, and devour one another; the great need of the world 
has been the abolishment of war, and the establishment of peace. 
For a long time it was impossible to get even this elementary 
idea recognized; most of the moralists insisted that war was 
essentially a good thing; that it was the nursing mother of all 
the great virtues; that without war the race would degenerate. 
So late an interpreter of history as the great German field 
marshal. Von Moltke, wrote not many years ago: "A perpetual 
peace is a dream and not even a beautiful dream. War is one 
of the elements of order in the world established by God. The 
noblest virtues of man are developed therein. Without war 
the world would degenerate and disappear in a morass of 
materialism." 

Similar judgments have been freely expressed by news- 
paper philosophers even within the last month. But, for the 
most part, that position is no longer maintained. It is rather 
late in the centuries to argue that war is a good thing. We 
have some pretty strong testimony about that from the great 
soldiers. So the later defenders of force have retreated from 
that stronghold and have entrenched themselves behind this 
proposition: War is a curse, a blight upon civilization; it is 
the great evil from which the world must be delivered, and the 
only way to prevent war is to maintain strong armaments. This 
is the maxim which has ruled what we are pleased to call our 
civilization for the last quarter of a century. To secure our- 
selves against war let us increase the armament; double the 
battalions, multiply the ships. The only way to lessen the peril 
of physical force is to increase the amount of it. And this, of 
course, introduces the element of rivalry in making this pro- 
vision. If France builds another fort, Germany enlists another 
army corps. If Germany votes another dreadnaught England 
votes two. All this rests upon the proposition that the only 
weapons with which this scourge of humanity can be success- 
fully attacked are carnal weapons. If you want to see that 
proposition riddled, read in the Independent of August 17 
Dr. Charles Jefferson's article on "The Nemesis of Armaments." 
One by one he takes up the pleas that have been urged in justifi- 
cation of armaments, and you see them shrivel in the flame of 
the conflagration now devastating Europe. 

" 'Armaments are the only sure guarantee of peace.' We 
have heard it a thousand times from men who seemed to know. 
It has been published in a thousand volumes and in ten thousand 

papers and so men come to accept it as the truth 

Through thirty years the work of increasing armaments has 
gone merrily on. It was in this way that sensible men worked 

for peace Not an appropriation for the increase of 

army or navy has been passed within the last twenty years by 
any parliament in the world, which has not been secured by men 

who were pleading for peace The peace of Europe, 

so all the wise men said, was due to armaments. It was a lie, 

15 



and the lie is now being shot to pieces before our eyes. It speaks 
well for the temper of the peoples of Europe that they have stood 
the strain so long. Armaments are provocative of war. You 
may increase them for a season, but at last you receive the 
retribution you invited." 

Another of the pleas for armaments is that they are a form 
of national insurance. "Six nations of Europe," says Dr. Jef- 
ferson, "went into this scheme of insurance. Within the past 
thirty years they have paid in premiums six billion four hundred 
and ninety-two millions of dollars and now they find they are 
not insured at all. Some fool in southeastern Europe threw a 
lighted match and instantly all Europe was in flames. Why? 
The whole house had been saturated with kerosene. Military 
and naval budgets are not insurance, they are kerosene. Their 
function is to render a nation inflammable. Europe had been 
so repeatedly drenched with kerosene that one match was suffi- 
cient to start an instantaneous and continent-wide conflagration. 
. . . . If one-tenth of the treasure spent by Europe in the 
last thirty years upon her armaments had been devoted to build- 
ing national safeguards against war, the present catastrophe 
would never have blighted the world." 

Another of the delusions concerning armaments which Dr. 
Jefferson demolishes, is the theory that they are the natural 
protection of righteousness and truth ; that they help to control 
the savagery of the backward nations and to shelter the weak 
from the aggressions of the strong. But he shows how the 
strong nations stood armed around Turkey for years, when she 
was ravishing and butchering helpless peoples, and did not in- 
terfere to put an end to her atrocities, "simply because they were 
bound hand and foot by their armaments" ; and how the Balkan 
states have just been turning their peninsula into a shambles — 
"and the great Christian Powers, like so many huge and un- 
worldly brutes stood in armor impotent, watching the frightful 
carnage go on, all of them so weighted down with steel that not 
one could move." 

Equally puerile is the plea that strong armies and navies 
guarantee the observance of conventions and treaties. We see 
how that is today. The stronger is the armament the more reck- 
less is the disregard of all treaty stipulations. 

So, then, the assumption on which the great military nations 
have been standing for the past three or four decades, that noth- 
ing but carnal weapons can be relied upon for the preserva- 
tion of the world's peace and the maintenance of equity and 
righteousness, is shattered to fragments by the events now tak- 
ing place before our eyes. It ought to have been obvious, from 
the first, that this was a perfectly irrational assumption. It 
ought to have been plain to those who know anything of human 
nature, that growths of good will are not promoted by the sowing 
of the seeds of hate and destruction; but this, unhappily, is a 
truth which it has been very hard to get this old world of ours 
to accept. This is the age-long failure of Christianity — this fail- 
ure to believe in the might of the moral and spiritual forces. 

16 



Jesus bore testimony to it, in His life and in His death; Paul 
stood forth as the champion of the warfare which rejects carnal 
weapons, and trusts in truth and love. For two or three cen- 
turies Christianity rested mainly on this basis, and its triumphs 
were wonderful. Before the end of the third century it had 
gained possession of the larger part of the then known world. 
But then it was that it entered into its fatal alliance with the 
empire ; it began to rely on carnal weapons, and from this point 
onward its vigor was reduced and its conquests were dubious. 
It swept whole tribes into its enclosures at the edge of the sword, 
and baptized them by platoons, but such additions to its numbers 
fatally lowered its standards of piety and morality, and intro- 
duced elements of corruption into its life from which it has never 
been able to free itself. 

All the persecutions by which the church has been disfigured 
illustrate this fearful illusion — the persecutions of the Hussites 
in Bohemia ; the persecutions of the Anabaptists by the Reform- 
ers ; the persecution of Protestants in the days of Bloody Mary, 
and the persecution of both Catholics and Puritans in the days 
of Elizabeth; the persecution of Quakers and Baptists and 
Methodists by the Puritans themselves in New England — -all 
these are instances of the proneness of the church to trust in 
carnal weapons. 

Even in the time of the Reformation, when the effort was 
made to purge away some of the defilements which the worship 
of force had brought in, Luther and the other Reformers had 
far too much faith in the Protestant princes, and far too little 
in the truth and love on which their protest ought to have rested ; 
so that they turned their backs on the peasants pleading for the 
recognition of their human rights, and relentlessly used the 
weapons that are carnal in strengthening their organization. 
The Reformation movement was impeded and weakened in its 
very beginnings by putting too much trust in carnal weapons. 

And while it has been true of many branches of Protes- 
tantism that they have kept tolerably free from political entangle- 
ments, yet there has always been, in all branches of the church, 
far too strong a tendency to rely on materialistic forces rather 
than on moral and spiritual forces. And this really amounts to 
the same thing. 

Money, for example, is the concentration and embodiment 
of material power; and the church which learns to depend on 
money, to permit the question of its revenues to shape its policy 
or influence its teaching, is making its warfare with carnal 
weapons. 

There are other kinds of force also, besides physical force, 
which Christians sometimes use, and which they have no right 
to use. There are coercions which are not muscular. All 
attempts to put social pressure on people, to constrain them to 
adopt your opinions or follow your leaders, come under the cate- 
gory of fighting with carnal weapons. Truth and love are the 
only weapons Paul allowed himself to use — the only weapons 
any disciple of Jesus Christ has a right to wield. If you can 

17 



get your neighbor to see that your doctrine is true and your 
way is the right way and he goes with you heartily and from 
conviction, that is good Christian warfare. If you can enlist 
his interest in your cause or your leader and can inspire in him 
affection for yourself or your comrades and can thus secure his 
co-operation, that, too, is the thing to be desired. But to make 
him feel that his failure to agree with you will be regarded by 
you as an offense; that he will lose caste or standing by his 
refusal; that unless he joins your church, or your party, he will 
be made very uncomfortable and perhaps will suffer serious 
losses — this is to wage warfare with carnal weapons. 

There is a good deal of this, I am sorry to say. There is 
a great deal more faith, among people who claim to be Chns- 
tians, in the efficacy of methods more or less coercive, than in 
the persuasive power of truth and love. If you venture to 
disagree, in your opinion, with your Christian neighbors, I 
should say that probably where one of them will try, by friendly 
arguments, to change your opinions, at least ten of them will 
denounce you as a hypocrite and a traitor and a coward, and will 
endeavor to convince you that you have forfeited the respect of 
decent people. I have had large experience in this line and feel 
qualified to testify. 

This shows, of course, how much more faith people gen- 
erally have in methods of violence than they have in methods 
of reason and love. But what strikes me most forcibly in the 
use of these coercive tactics is not so much their brutality as 
their futility. Do such people really think that by their abusive 
and bullying policy they are going to strengthen the cause they 
have at heart? Do they suppose that denunciation and vilifica- 
tion of those who differ from them is likely to convert them to 
their way of thinking? Judging from my own experience I 
should say that it would not. When a man abuses me for not 
thinking as he does I am disposed to think that his position 
must be a very weak one. As to the question whether I am a 
coward or a traitor I am in a position to know much better than 
he can know whether these charges are true or not and if I 
am satisfied in my own mind that they are not true, I lose con- 
fidence in his judgment, and am not likely to be instructed by 
him as to what I should believe. Really I can think of few 
things more stupid than the personal abuse of the man who 
differs from you in opinion. If he is the bad man you say he 
is — a truckler and a black-hearted traitor — your denunciation 
will not change his evil purpose; and if he is a good man with 
erroneous opinions your accusations against his character, which 
he knows to be untrue, are not likely to convince him of his 
error. 

It is strange to what extent the human mind is warped from 
its integrity by the use of this kind of controversy. Men get 
into these ways of arguing and become unaware of their own 
mental obliquity. I remember a story which Miss Addams 
once told me of a conversation with Tolstoi, about his doctrine 
of non-resistance. Miss Addams believes in that doctrine her- 

18 



self, and lives up to it, too, I think, pretty consistently ; and she 
made bold to say to the Count: "You are opposed to the use 
of force, and so am I; but how about violent language? Isn't 
that about the same thing? I think that I would rather be 
struck with the fist than to have hard and hateful words spoken 
to me or about me?" 

"What was his reply?" I asked. 

"He hadn't much to say," she said. Manifestly not. The 
keen question had pierced the joints of his armor. The great 
champion of non-resistance needed the reproof. For words 
which are barbed with bitterness are carnal weapons, just as 
truly as bullets or brickbats. 

Another illustration of the perverse determination of the 
American people to trust in force rather than in truth and love, 
is the growing tendency to promote moral reforms by political 
methods. I am quite sure that this is a growing tendency. The 
church and the state have not been formally connected in this 
country since the adoption of our national constitution, and 
cannot be so long as that remains unchanged; but the church, 
in these later years, has been increasingly relying on the power 
of the state to do the work which she is called to do. 

I am thinking now specially of the work of moral reform — 
of correcting such evils as drunkenness and licentiousness. It 
would seem that this should be primarily the work of the church, 
and that it should be mainly done by moral and spiritual agen- 
cies. Of course I am not denying that something may be done 
by law to lessen or prevent these evils. The Christian people 
are citizens, and as such they are bound to use the machinery 
of legislation as efficiently as they can to resist these evils. What 
the apostle calls carnal weapons can be used and must be used 
in this warfare. 

But the Christian people are equipped with weapons of 
another sort which are far mightier, before God, to the casting 
down of these strongholds of vice, than any which can be wielded 
by the state. The weapons that are not carnal, the weapons of 
truth and love, are a hundred times more efficient than the 
weapons of force. Law can do something, but, as Paul says, it 
is weak, through the flesh. It is simply an instrument of force. 
It says: "You shall" or "you shall not." It deals wholly with 
the will. It does not touch the central sources of conduct, the 
convictions, the wishes, the affections, the choices. It can forbid 
a man to sell or to buy liquor. It cannot convince him that liquor 
is not good for him, and that he is better off without it. It can 
shut up the open bagnio. It cannot cleanse the lustful heart. 

Now I am not saying that the little which law can do should 
not be done, nor that the disciples of Jesus Christ should not be 
zealous to see that it is done; but I am saying that their con- 
duct proves that they have a great deal more faith in carnal 
weapons than they have in spiritual weapons; that in dealing 
with these problems of social vice they put vastly more emphasis 
on the legal measures for its suppression than they do on the 
moral measures for its extirpation. In all this campaign against 

19 



social vice the churches have proved, over and over, that their 
main reliance is on force rather than on truth and love. 

That is the reason why county option has been in so many 
cases a comparative failure. When the victory was won at the 
polls, the victors went home and folded their hands. The law 
had been invoked and set in operation, and nothing either great 
or small remained for them to do. If they had understood their 
business, they would have realized that the battle was just be- 
gun. That was the time for rallying the moral forces of the 
community ; for saturating the public mind with the truth about 
the evils of drunkenness ; for organizing friendly social agencies 
for those on whom the doors of the saloon had been closed ; for 
offering a helpful hand to the men who had been put out of 
business, to assist them to other employment and make them 
aware that their neighbors held no personal grudges against 
them and wished for their welfare. How much there is that 
needs to be done for a community which has called in the law to 
close its drinking places! What an opportunity is offered then 
for vigilant, large-hearted, intelligent Christian work, to heal 
the wounds and adjust the dislocations and conserve the moral 
gains! Has much of this kind of work been done in the towns 
and counties that have gone dry? Something, perhaps, but very 
little. The importance of this kind of work is but feebly appre- 
hended by the churches at large. The real sources of their 
power are hidden from their sight. They are so obsessed by the 
notion of curing the evils of the world by law that they have 
largely forgotten how to use the moral forces with which they 
have been intrusted. 

That is a serious criticism, but I shall have to let it stand, 
appealing for its truth to the verdict of the coming years. 

What I am trying to point out to you is the prevailing ten- 
dency of the world — a tendency in which the church has per- 
mitted itself to be largely implicated — to put its trust in the 
methods of force, instead of the methods of truth and love. And 
I am calling your attention to it today, because we have before 
our eyes such an appalling demonstration of the futility of force^ 

All the great nations of the earth have been gathering into 
their hands, for the last quarter of a century, as much as they 
could of the physical force of the world, for one great moral 
purpose — the prevention of war, the preservation of peace. We 
have their word for it; that is the great end they have had in 
view. And they have insisted that the only method by which 
this result could be secured was the accumulation of force — 
physical force, destructive force. They had no abiding faith 
in anything else; small faith in ideas; less faith in moral agen- 
cies; a feeble faith in the cultivation of friendships and co- 
operations among the nations ; no real working faith in anything 
but force, 

I do not know that the church can severely censure them 
for having entertained this faith in force: she herself, as we 
have seen, has been quite too much inclined to look for her 
strength to the same sources. But she must be interested in the 

20 



result of this experiment. With all the rest of the world she 
is watching the fulfillment of the trust of the nations in their 
mighty aggregation of force for the preservation of peace. Has 
any disillusion more dramatic ever been flashed in the face of 
the children of men? We see now just what all this argument 
amounts to by which we are urged to seek moral ends by immoral 
means; to gather grapes from thorns or figs from thistles. 
Europe is writhing in agony today, in the grip of the forces 
which have been gathered for the preservation of peace ! 

Is there any lesson in this which the church needs to learn? 
Her one deadly weakness has been her lack of faith in moral 
and spiritual agencies; her willingness to resort to coercion or 
fraud in the accomplishment of her purposes; her craven mis- 
giving that the weapons of light and love were not strong enough 
to overcome the evil, and that if you wanted to win you must 
make judicious use of carnal weapons. 

It would seem as if Divine Providence, after long patience 
with this crippling infidelity, had determined to gather up into 
one colossal object lesson the natural consequences of it and 
let the world and the church see precisely what is involved in 
this purblind policy. And it does seem as though the world, 
and the church, must be learning some lessons in these days that 
they cannot easily forget. 

These are momentous days through which we are passing. 
Such an overturning of kingdoms and thrones as we see im- 
pending, such a shaking of the earth and the heavens, must 
bring some profound changes in the structure of human society, 
in the ruling ideas of men. It will not be the same world, after 
these convulsions have subsided. The map of Europe will be 
remade; constitutions will be rewritten; the foundations of a 
new social order will emerge. 

May we not hope that as part of the grain which will be 
saved out of this winnowing the world may get the conviction 
of the futility of force — the conviction that the interests of 
righteousness and peace and freedom are best promoted by other 
methods than those of coercion and violence? I hope that the 
militant suffragettes will take time to consider this, and that 
the I. W. W. and the Anarchistic Socialists will pay good heed 
to it; that all the dynamiters will think it over, and that those 
representatives of the employing classes who are meditating the 
subjugation of the laboring classes will reflect upon it; that 
all men who think that the right way to promote the causes they 
have at heart is to vilify and traduce those who disagree with 
them, will give some attention to it ; above all, that the Christian 
Church will try to find room in its ruling convictions for this 
truth that the weapons which are not carnal are the mighty 
weapons ; that the meekness and gentleness of Christ are forces 
that can be trusted to win and to hold the kingdoms of this world. 

After so many centuries of dallying and fumbling with the 
agencies of materialism, and after such a cosmical demonstra- 
tion of their impotence, may we not believe that the Christian 
Church will be wise enough to renounce its faith in the weapons 

21 



that are carnal — in all forms of them — and put on its own shin- 
ing armor of light and love? What a glorious church it would be, 
if it could rise to this vision ; if it could cast itself boldly on the 
truth as it is in Jesus! How soon the strongholds of hate and 
strife would fall before it ; and the world would be subdued to the 
obedience of Christ. 

One thing is sure, this war will soon be over. In the nature 
of the case it cannot last long. Starvation will put an end to it, 
and starvation cannot be far off. It will leave a horrible wreck 
behind it, but it will be over. We shall be past its noise and its 
smoke and its moral confusion, and there will be a great silence 
in the earth, a silence in which we shall be able, I trust, to revise 
many of our theories, and to reconsider our ruling ideas, and to 
renounce some of our worst obsessions, and to rebuild our lives 
on the sure foundations of truth and love. 

"When the cannon booms, 
When the snare drums rattle fiercely, 
And the feet of men in khaki hammer time on the pave. 

It is easy to be brave ; 
It is easy to believe God is angry with the other man, our brother, 
And has left the sword of Gideon in our wayward human hand. 

When the cannon booms. 

"When the cannon booms, 
When the battle flags are fluttering and men are going mad 
With the blind desire for glory, 
Filled with visions grand and gory, 

It is easy to assent 
To the Corsican blasphemer's scoffing creed. 
It is easy to believe God is with the big battalions, 
Whether cherubim or hellions, 

When the cannon booms. 

"When the cannon booms, 
When the primal love of fighting stirs the tiger in our blood, 
And the fascinating smell 
Of the sulphur fumes of hell 
Kouses memories of the pit from which our human nature rose, 

It is easy to forget, 
God was not found in the earthquake, in the strong wind or the 

fire; 
It is easy to forget how at last the prophet heard Him 
As a still, small voice, 

When the cannon booms. 

22 



"When the cannon booms, 
When the war lords strut and swagger 
And the battleships are plowing for the bitter crop of death, 
While the shouting rends the ear 
Echoing from the empyrean, 

It is difficult to hear 
Through the din the Galilean 

With His calm voice preaching peace on earth to men ! 
'Twill be easier to claim. 
If we will, the Christian name. 

To become as little children and be men of gentle will. 
When the cannon booms, the cannon booms no more." 

William Herbert Carruth. 
Aug. 23, 1914. 



23 



Is Christianity a Failure? 



For the time is come foi- judgTnent to begin at the house of God. 

I Peter IV: 18. 

During a recent absence from home I received two letters 
from two of my younger brothers in the Congregational min- 
istry, with both of whom my relations have been rather intimate, 
telling me of changes of a somewhat radical nature which had 
occurred in their ministry. These were not changes in theolog- 
ical belief, for they both continue to hold, so far as I know, the 
same opinions that they have held for a good while; they were 
rather changes in their attitude toward organized Christianity. 
One of them had found it impossible to co-operate with the 
church of which for several years he had been pastor; the free- 
dom which he sought for the expression of his views on certain 
social matters had been denied him, and he had withdrawn from 
the church and was organizing an independent religious society 
which was to meet in a theater. The basis of their new organiza- 
tion, so far as I could see, was not only broadly, but deeply Chris- 
tian ; it was meant to represent, with simplicity and fullness, the 
principles of the Gospel of Christ. 

The other of my friends had not gone so far. With his 
church he had had no misunderstanding, and he had not with- 
drawn from its pastorate, but he had been growing into a con- 
viction, which his congregation appeared to share with him, that 
the church, as at present organized, is not efficient for the service 
needed by the kingdom, and he had proposed to his people that 
they abandon, for the present, their ordinary preaching service, 
and come together, every Sunday morning, to study the Sermon 
on the Mount, to see if they can find out what Christianity really 
is — what it means to be a Christian ; and whether any of them, 
and, if any, how many of them, are ready to follow the light 
which they shall find and to put in practice the religion of Jesus. 
They seem to have agreed that this might require considerable 
change in their manner of life, and they had come to the point at 
which they were ready to confront that possibility. What those 
changes might be they did not know ; that was what they were 
going to try to find out in those Sunday morning studies. 

It is significant, also, that this action on their part, was pre- 
cipitated by the present war. It was the spectacle of the great 
Christian nations, flying at each other's throats, which had con- 
strained them to stop and ask themselves, "What is Christianity 
anyhow? Does Christianity contemplate or tolerate such things 
as these? Are we implicated in a system which has room in it 
for such horrible brutalities? Let us try to find out what our 
religion permits and requires and what we mean when we say 
we are Christians." 

24 



I think that such questions have been started in a good many- 
minds during the past four months. This war is probing our 
creeds and our convictions; it is applying the acid test to our 
theories and our institutions, political, social and religious; be- 
fore we are through with it we shall have to do some serious 
thinking. 

At any rate the contents of these letters from my two 
friends were sufficient to afford me much food for thought. If 
they had been rash and radical men it would have been different, 
but they are both very thoughtful, very sincere, very unselfish 
men and their difficulties could not be lightly dismissed. 

The two books which occupied most of the time of my jour- 
ney across the continent were Rudolph Eucken's, "Can We Still 
be Christians?" and Stanton Coit's, "The Soul of America." The 
great German's inquiry seemed strangely pertinent. That is 
surely what we want to know. Eucken's book was written some 
time before the war, however, and does not touch the burning 
issues; it is a profound philosophic treatise and deals with the 
underlying principles of Christianity ; and his answer is, not only 
that we can still be Christians, but that we must be ; that Chris- 
tianity gives the only rational solution to the great problems of 
life ; but — and this is the arresting suggestion — that the churches 
as now organized, Protestant and Catholic, do not represent 
Christianity; that it will be necessary for us to find some bet- 
ter form in which the spirit of Christianity may incarnate and 
express itself. That is surely an impressive verdict from one 
who has been hailed as the great champion of the Christian faith. 

Dr. Coit's book is a stirring plea for the merging of all our 
religious organizations in one which shall represent and express 
the national ideal. The spirit of America is for him the supreme 
object of worship. And he holds that we shall never reach our 
highest development until our hearts are united in this lofty de- 
votion. He does not urge us to abandon our existing church 
organizations, but rather to supplement our present aims and 
ideals by unitedly cultivating the national ideal. "The Religious 
Congregations of America" he says "must assume the task of 
educating the American public to deify the Moral Genius of the 
United States. It is the task of the churches to bring widely be- 
fore the people the invisible glory and hidden meaning of their 
own responsibility and opportunity." This suggests a view of 
their function which would certainly give quite a new direction 
to the central ideas and activities of many of them. 

On reaching home I found awaiting me the November Atlan- 
tic Monthly with an article on "The Failure of the Church," by 
Edward Lewis. I have known Mr. Lewis, through his pen, for 
several years ; some time before I knew his name I had been fol- 
lowing his articles which appeared over a pseudonymous signa- 
ture in an English journal, and I have found him a thinker of 
quick insight and a courageous and stimulating teacher. Not 
long ago he startled his brethren in the British ministry by re- 
signing an influential pulpit in London and announcing his pur- 
pose of taking up an independent ministry. This article on "The 

25 



Failure of the Church," gives his reasons for so doing. Evi- 
dently he has lost faith in organized religion. He expects the 
world to be Christianized, he wants to help, but he has no hope 
that the work will be done by the organized church. "Religion 
flourishes, the organized church decays." And he goes on to tell 
us the reasons why. Not to multiply such testimonies, of which 
there are many, let me mention only one more, — John Gals- 
worthy's passionate outcry in the November Scribner entitled, 
"Thoughts on This War." Thus it begins : 

"Three hundred thousand church spires raised to the glory 
of Christ! Three hundred million human beings baptized into 
His service! And — war to the death of them all! Let your 
hearts beat to God and your fists in the face of the enemy!" 
"In prayer we call God's blessing on our valiant troops !" 

"God on the lips of each potentate, and under three hundred 
thousand spires prayer that twenty-two million servants of 
Christ may receive from God the blessed strength to tear and 
blow each other to pieces, to ravage and burn, to wrench hus- 
bands from wives, fathers from their children, to starve the 
poor, and everywhere destroy the works of the spirit. Prayer 
under three hundred thousand, spires for the blessed strength of 
God to use the noblest, most loyal instincts of the human race 
to the ends of carnage! God be with us to the death and dis- 
honor of our foes! (Whose God He is, no less than ours.) 
The God who gave His only begotten Son to bring on earth peace 
and good will toward men! 

"No creed — in these days when two and two are put to- 
gether — can stand against such reeling subversion of the founda- 
tion. After this monstrous mockery, beneath this grinning 
skull of irony, how shall there remain faith in a religion 
preached and practised to such ends? When this war is over 
and reason resumes its sway, our dogmas will all be found to 
have been scored through forever. Whatever else be the out- 
come of this business, let us at least realize the truth : It is the 
death of mystic Christianity! Let us will that it be the birth 
of an ethic Christianity that men can really practise!" 

It is a sharp challenge, brothers, which is thus thrown in 
the face of organized Christianity, and it comes at a rather 
critical juncture. For some time thoughtful and candid men 
have been regarding with some concern the condition of the 
Protestant Churches; few of them have been growing; many 
of them are barely holding their own, some of them are losing 
ground, and signs that something was wrong were more and 
more apparent. Now comes this tremendous crash in which 
the whole fabric of modern civilization seems to be tottering to 
its fall. We have been calling it Christian civilization. It hav<3 
generally been assumed that Christianity was responsible for it. 
Nothing is more inevitable, therefore, than that it should be 
hailed by those who disbelieve in Christianity as the collapse 
of that religion. We have all heard it said, a hundred times, 
within the past four months, "The war proves that Christianity 
is a failure!" 

26 



But what do we mean by Christianity? How is it shown 
to be a failure? Words are often used very loosely, not only in 
common conversation, but in argumentative discourse. It is 
well to have reference to the dictionary and make sure of our 
definitions before we begin our discussions. 

Christianity, in a general sense, is the religion founded by 
Jesus Christ; but the dictionary says that it is properly divided 
into Historical Christianity, Dogmatic Christianity, and Vital 
Christianity. Let us consider each of these: 

(a) Historical Christianity connotes the facts and princi- 
ples stated in the New Testament, ''especially those concerning 
the life, sufferings, death, resurrection, ascension and nature of 
Jesus together with the subsequent development of the Christian 
Church." 

Christianity in this sense cannot be said to have been 
proved a failure by the war. Historical Christianity is a fact; 
it has existed for nineteen centuries, and has exercised more or 
less influence in the world. The war cannot cancel or obliterate 
a historical fact. 

(b) Dogmatic Christianity is made up of "the systems of 
theological doctrine, founded on the New Testament. These 
systems differ with different churches, sects and schools." 
There is a great variety of such systems. When we say that 
Christianity has failed do we mean that all of them have been 
proved untrue, or that some of them have been ; and if some of 
them, which of them? The statement lacks definiteness. It is 
more than probable that some of these dogmatic explanations 
of Christianity have been more or less disfigured and discred- 
ited by the things which are happening in Europe, but it is nec- 
essary to specify more particularly before we undertake to judge. 

(c) "Vital Christianity is the spirit manifested by Jesus 
Christ in His life and which He commanded His followers to 
imitate." Has this been proved a failure? Where, in connec- 
tion with this war, in the disputes in which it originated or in 
the conduct of it, has it made its appearance? It cannot have 
failed, for it has not been tried. 

I suppose that those who say that Christianity has failed 
are looking at the nations and the churches. Most of the great 
nations engaged in this war are called "Christian nations." 
Turkey and Japan do not claim to be Christian nations, but the 
others all do — Germany, France, Russia, Austria, Servia, 
England; they are all put down in the geography as "Christian 
nations." And the ecclesiastical organizations mainly prevail- 
ing in all these countries are Christian organizations. Chris- 
tianity is supposed to be represented by these nations and by 
these churches. 

Under this supposition it is not to be denied that Chris- 
tianity is a failure. 

Consider first. the nations. If they are in any proper sense 
of the word Christian nations, if Christianity can be held to be 
represented by their national policy and practise, then Chris- 
tianity is indeed a deadly failure. For the theory on which all 

27 



these states have hitherto sought to adjust their relations to 
each other — what Mr. Lowes Dickinson calls "the governmental 
theory" — the theory that states "are natural enemies, [that] 
they have always been so and they always will be, and [that] 
force is the only arbiter between them" — this theory is proving 
itself now, on these blood-soaked plains of Europe, the most 
ghastly blunder that human stupidity has ever committed. 
These nations have been trying to build civilization on the 
foundations of suspicion and fear and greed and enmity; and 
what we are witnessing is the natural and inevitable conse- 
quence. If Christianity is responsible for this; if they are in 
this conflict because they are Christian nations, if they are illus- 
trating Christianity, then Christendom may well behold in the 
aeroplane that flits across the lurid sky above some burning city 
a symbol of the balances in which systems are tested, with the 
legend that Belshazzar read but could not interpret: "TEKEL — 
thou art weighed in the balances and found wanting." 

But are these nations, any of them in their political struc- 
ture, in the ruling ideas of their statecraft. Christian nations? 
All of them contain many Christian elements ; among their peo- 
ples are cherished institutions, influences, tendencies, sentiments 
which are truly Christian; even in the laws of most of them 
Christian principles are incorporated; but the states in their 
national policies, and especially in their international policies, 
are far from being Christian. For, if I may quote Mr. Dickin- 
son again, it is the universal assumption that "they are in per- 
petual and inevitable antagonism to one another, and though 
they may group themselves in alliances, that can only be for 
temporary purposes to meet some other alliance or single power. 
For states are bound by a moral or physical obligation to expand 
indefinitely, each at the cost of the others." This, I say, is the 
traditional and almost universal theory of the relations of states. 
This theory is the root out of which this war has sprung. And 
this theory is the exact antithesis of Christianity— of the Chris- 
tianity of Jesus Christ. 

For the simplest, the most primary, the most elemental 
principle of Christianity is that all nations and peoples are the 
children of one Father in heaven ; that we are all brothers and 
friends ; that antagonisms between individuals or between tribes 
are unnatural and abominable; that we are here in the world 
together to share the good of the world, to be helpers of each 
other's property, and promoters of each other's peace. If these 
nations had been governing themselves by this principle, there 
would have been no war. When they ignore and spurn this 
principle, and base their policy upon the anti-Christian assump- 
tion of national antagonism and enmity it is absurd to call them 
Christian nations, and ridiculous to speak of the wreck and ruin 
into which their conduct has plunged them as a failure of Chris- 
tianity. 

But how about the church ? We said that the organizations 
of religion in these nations that call themselves Christian are 
organizations bearing the Christian name and that they are 

28 



supposed to represent Christianity. Has not Christianity, as 
represented by them, proved to be a failure? That, indeed, it 
might be difficult to deny. 

But do these religious organizations, which we find in these 
warring nations, truly represent Christianity? No; they do 
not. It is quite impossible that they should. For, in the first 
place, they do not agree. Christianity, in its essence, must be 
one ; it was the thought and the prayer and the purpose of Jesus 
that His disciples might be one; that they might be conscious 
of their unity ; that they might unitedly bear testimony for the 
truth He came to teach. Behold they are split into numberless 
sects and factions; they dispute and contradict one another; 
they cannot agree about the truth He taught, nor about Him; 
oftentimes they bitterly hate and suspect and malign one an- 
other. Can such a ruck and rabble of sects represent the truth 
as it is in Jesus? Is it possible for them to embody and ex- 
press with coherency and convincing clearness the principles 
of Christianity? The one big business of Christianity is to 
bring the world into unity; and organized Christianity stands 
before the world as the symbol of division rather than of unity. 
Here is the great schism by which the Eastern and Western 
churches — each with a strange lack of humor, proclaiming itself 
Catholic — are torn apart and set in antagonism to each other; 
and here are the numerous racial groups of oriental nations 
which have no dealings with either of these Catholic orthodoxies 
nor with one another; and here are the multitudinous sects of 
what we call Protestantism — some of them loudly protesting 
that they are not Protestant — all of them looking sharply for 
their line-fences and more concerned for the perpetuation of 
their divisions than for the unity of the body of Christ — is it 
possible that these fractions, any or all of them, should have the 
right or the power to represent Christianity? 

Let us understand. I am not saying that there is no Chris- 
tianity in these churches ; there is a great deal of it. There are 
a great many individuals, a great many families, a great many 
groups of philanthropic workers, a great many local churches 
which may fairly be called Christian ; the leaven of Christianity 
is found at work in manifold ways in society; the seed of good 
will is widely sown, and it is bringing forth the peaceable fruits 
of Christianity, not so abundantly as we could wish, but still 
sufficiently to affect very greatly the social order. But organ- 
ized Christianity, as represented in the ecclesiasticisms, is a very 
different thing from this vital Christianity which propagates 
itself from heart to heart and from life to life. Vital Chris- 
tianity has not wholly failed, though its work has been greatly 
crippled by its divisions and the perversions of its message! 
which have been produced by ecclesiasticism ; but organized 
Christianity is a signal and dismal failure. Of this the present 
war is convincing proof. For while it is not the business of the 
church to rule the state, but to keep its hands off the political 
machinery, it is its business to saturate the minds of the people 
with Christian ideas and principles — with the sense of the divine 

29 



Fatherhood and the human brotherhood; with the conviction 
that we are members one of another and prosper not by what 
we hoard but by what we share. And the outstanding fact is 
that while individuals and families and lesser groups have 
grasped these central principles of Christianity, the two great 
realms of human activity — the economic realm and the political 
realm — have not been greatly influenced by them; the churches 
have not succeeded in Christianizing politics or business. Chris- 
tian principles — the principles of good will, of brotherhood, of 
friendship — have been treated in these realms as sentimental- 
isms, rather than as rules of conduct. 

It is with the national aspect that we are chiefly concerned 
today, though the other is inextricably connected with it. The 
fact now confronting us is that the churches have failed to 
Christianize the political life of the nations. They have failed 
to convince the people that they are and ought to be friends. 
They have rather assumed that "states are natural enemies," 
and "that force is the only arbiter between them." Of course 
there have been people in all the churches and in all ages of 
the church who have accepted the teachings of Christ about the 
divine Fatherhood and the human brotherhood, and have 
preached them with all earnestness ; but the churches as organi- 
zations have never believed these teachings; how could they, 
divided as they were — spurning for themselves the bond of 
fellowship, holding each other in contempt and fear? The 
assumption of the governmental authorities that the natural 
relation of states is one of enmity and antagonism, and that 
each ought to be in a constant state of preparedness for bloody 
conflicts with all its neighbors, is an assumption which the 
churches have never boldly and resolutely challenged. They 
have practically assented to it. They have never risen up with 
the passion of Christian conviction, to denounce it as the doc- 
trine of anti-Christ, and to drive it from the earth. They have 
rather apologized for it, and abetted it; there has been no clear, 
convincing, persistent testimony from the church against the 
theory of the natural enmity of nations. 

This is the palpable failure of the churches — their horrible, 
deadly failure — which every day is bringing into clearer light. 
This is the one great thing that they ought to have done, and 
that they have failed to do. This is the truth which the whole 
world is slowly taking in. Clearer and clearer it is becoming 
that the churches ought to have prevented this war — ought to 
have put an end to all war long before this; that if they had 
believed the simple truth of universal brotherhood which Jesus 
came to teach, and had put it at the front of all their teaching 
and had driven it home to human hearts, this horrible collapse 
of civilization could not have occurred. But it is not Chris- 
tianity that has failed; it is the churches that have failed, and 
they have failed for the lack of Christianity; because the vast 
majority of them are not and have never dared to be consist- 
ently and thoroughly Christian. 

80 



I think that one of the sure results of this war will be a. 
sharp reckoning with the churches because of this failure. Nay, 
I think that the churches are going to call themselves to account. 
They cannot ignore these unhappy conditions. They are bound 
to ask themselves some searching question: "Why is it," they 
will be constrained to demand, "that these nations which we 
have been claiming as Christian nations have been filling the 
earth with rapine and slaughter? Why have they been ravag- 
ing the fairest fields of earth and wrecking its noblest monu- 
ments of art, and ploughing the lands with trenches wherein are 
cast the bodies of hundreds of thousands of their young men, 
and plunging millions who were living in comfort into the depths 
of poverty, and leaving countless myriads of widows and orphans 
to loneliness and misery? Why were these nations left to fall 
into this abyss of iniquity? All these great nations are Chris- 
tian nations. Most of these rulers and counselors and captains 
have been baptized into the name of Christ and have sworn alle- 
giance to Him. Do they not know his law? Have they not 
heard His Gospel? Has no one told them that they are all chil- 
dren of a common Father — all brothers by blood ? They have all 
been acting as though they were born to be natural enemies, 
as though suspicion and fear and hate were the only bonds be- 
tween them. Why this madness? Who is to blame for these 
horrible delusions? 

"Alas, the blame must be ours. We, the churches of Jesus 
Christ, must own that it is our fault. We were put in truth 
with the Gospel and we have not been faithful to our trust. We 
have been timid or stammering, or false witnesses. We have 
never enforced, as we ought to have enforced, the Gospel of 
peace upon these kings and lords and rulers of men. We have 
apologized for war — have glorified it sometimes ; we have stood 
by, without protesting, while the lords of misrule were kindling 
the suspicions, cultivating the fears, exciting the enmities, build- 
ing the armaments which must breed war: and we have never 
lifted up our voices as we ought to have done to denounce this 
madness, to reprove these enmities, to heal this distemper. We 
might have done it. We ought to have done it. We had in our 
armories the stores, in our keeping the resources of light and 
love with which we might have put an end to this bloody busi- 
ness long ago. For the weapons of our warfare, though not 
carnal, are mighty, under God for the pulling down of these 
strongholds of hate. 

"We have not done it, and this is our sin and our shame. 
It is because we have failed to do it, that these horrible things 
are taking place. But it is not Christianity that has failed ; it 
is we who have failed to enforce and incarnate and apply Chris- 
tianity — it is we who have failed. And our failure in this is 
a symptom and an indication of our weakness and delinquency 
in many things. 

"It is time for judgment to begin at the house of God. This 
war is calling us to a revision of our standards, to a sharp re- 
consideration of our ideas, our plans, our arms. Something is. 

31 



the matter with the church ; let us find out what it is. Only let 
us not listen any longer to those who prate to us about going 
back to the religion of some old day. That is a good part of 
what ails us. We have been going back quite too persistently — 
we had better go the other way. 'Forgetting the things that 
are behind — stretching forward to the things that are before,' — 
that is our slogan." 

Mr. Lewis tells us in the article to which I referred in the 
beginning, that one of the first articles of belief for a truly re- 
ligious man within the Christian community is that there is a 
"Beyond Christianity!" Yes; there is always a beyond for 
everything that lives and grows. But for most of the churches 
of this day the call is not to go beyond Christianity, but to over- 
take it if they can. It is a long ways ahead of them. They will 
have to get rid of a good deal of their baggage and quicken their 
marching step if they expect to catch up with it in time to share 
its triumphs. For Christianity has been moving much more 
rapidly than the church has been moving during the last gen- 
eration. 

I quoted what Mr. Galsworthy said about the doom of 
mystic Christianity. I don't know just what he means by 
mystic Christianity, but I am convinced that there is something 
unreal there which will have to go. Let me close with what he 
says about that which will take its place, and which "has already 
been a long time preparing to come forward" : 

"I know not what, it will be called or whether it will even 
receive a name. It will be too much in earnest to care for such 
a ceremony. But one thing is certain, it will be far more Chris- 
tian than the Christianity which has brought us to these pres- 
ent ends. Its creed will be a noiseless and passionate conviction 
that man can be saved, not by a far-away despotic God who can 
be enlisted by each combatant for the destruction of his foes, 
but by the divine element in man, the God within the human 
soul. . . . The creed will be a fervent, almost secret appli- 
cation of the saying, 'Love thy neighbor as thyself.' It will 
be ashamed of appeals to God to put right that which man has 
bungled, of supplications to the deity to fight against the deity. 
It will have the pride of the artist and the artisan. And it will 
have its own mysticism, its own wonder at the mystery of the 
all-embracing Principle, which has produced such a creature as 
this man, with such marvelous potentiality for the making of 
fine things and living of fine lives ; such heroism, such savagery ; 
such wisdom and such blank stupidity ; such a queer, insuperable 
instinct for going on, and on, and ever on." 

Dec. 13, 1914. 



What Will End the War? 



Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they 

learn war any more. — ISA. II : 4. 

I hesitated, before announcing my subject for tonight, upon 
the phrasing of it; whether I should say: "How the War Must 
End"; or "How the War Will End"; but concluded finally to 
start out with this phrase: "What Will End the War?" Per- 
haps it would have been still better to say, "What would end it" ; 
for I feel very sure that I know what would end it, more sure 
than I am of what will end it. Quite a number of things might 
be mentioned which would end it, but some of them are not 
likely to happen. I would rather speak of those which are 
more likely to happen. 

Of one thing we are sure — the war will end. That is a 
future certainty which it is well to contemplate. All troubles 
have an end. There never was a night that was not followed 
by morning, never a storm which did not end in sunshine, never 
a winter which was not the forerunner of spring. Tuck that 
away in your memory, and bring it out now and then, and look 
at it. There was never a war which was not followed by peace 
— though there have been periods when wars lasted long and 
men waited months and years for peace. Peace was once but 
an interval between wars, often too brief; of late the propor- 
tion has been changing and peace is now over all the earth more 
nearly the permanent condition; war has become the interval. 
Let us trust that the day is not far off when peace shall be 
permanent and unbroken, a peace which no war shall follow. 

Some of us will be obliged to confess that this war has lasted 
much longer than we thought possible; we thought the fury 
must spend its force in a few weeks; we were not good proph- 
ets. The end seems farther off now than it did at the begin- 
ning. For one thing we did not believe that the kings of the 
earth could stand and see so many of their young men killed and 
so much desolation and misery spread abroad in the earth. We 
thought their hearts would have relented and that their con- 
sciences would have revolted before now at the suffering for 
which they have made themselves responsible. They seem de- 
termined to give us some new impression of the cruelty that can 
hide in human hearts. 

When I speak of what will end the war I am not thinking 
chiefly of the particular circumstances which may bring about 
the cessation of conflict and carnage. That may result from the 
exhaustion of the combatants; they may possibly fight each 
other to a standstill, and cease for very weariness. That, per- 
haps, is the result most to be desired — no very decisive defeat 
or victory — rather a drawn battle. A smashing defeat of eith- 

3S 



er side would not end it; it would be but a suspension of hostil- 
ities. Germany dealt France a crushing blow in 1870, and the 
forty-four years that have elapsed since then have simply been 
years of preparation for the next battle. Nothing, in fact, is 
so undecisive as a great victory, unless, indeed the defeated 
party is practically annihilated, and that, in this case, is hardly 
likely to occur. The alternative of a victory decisive enough on 
either side to permit the dictationby the victors of the terms of 
peace are well set forth by Mr. Lov/es Dickinson, an English- 
man, in the Atlantic Monthly: 

''Let us suppose that the German powers win. We know 
well enough what kind of peace they will impose, for they have 
been at no pains to conceal their ambition. 'France must be 
so completely crushed that she can never come again across our 
path.' So General Bernhardi, voicing, it may be presumed the 
policy of the military caste that is master of Germany. The 
same, of course, applies to England. She shall be shorn of her 
empire, of her command of the seas, of all that the German state 
has hated and envied in the British state. Italy and the Balkana 
will be pillaged to the benefit of Austria, and Russia rolled back 
— though that would be all to the good — from her ambition 
to expand in the west. At the same time, every democratic 
movement in every country will be discouraged or annihilated. 
The principle of a brutal military domination will be established 
as the principle of Europe. The countries that are not militant 
will become so. And another reign of armed peace will begin, 
in which every genuine interest of civilization, all the true life 
of men and women will be sacrificed to the desperate effort of 
the defeated nations to recover their position and of the victor- 
ious ones to maintain theirs. 

"If, on the other hand, the Allies should win, the outlook 
is no more promising, if the diplomats are to have their way. The 
Allies, in that case, will endeavor finally to crush the German 
powers, as the latter are determined to finally crush the Allies. 
The English and the French will take the German colonies, 
Russia will dominate the Balkans, and probably appropriate Con- 
stantinople and a great slice of German territory. And France 
and England will be left face to face with what they will regard 
as the new menace of the Slav. With the result that in another 
quarter of a century or more they will combine with their 
present enemies to resist the advance of their present ally. 

"In either case the state of Europe will be the old bad state ; 
the piling up of armaments, at the cost of the continued pov- 
erty and degradation of the mass of the people ; the destruction, 
of all hope and effort toward radical social reform; and when 
the time comes, as in this case it infallibly will, the new war, 
the new massacre, the new impoverishment, — the perpetual and 
intolerable agony of a civilization forever struggling to the 
light, forever flung back by its own stupidity and wickedness 
into the hell in which at this moment it is writhing. Lord, how 
long, how long?" 

Thus it is plain that the war will not be ended by crushing^ 

84 



defeats or drastic policies. Such measures are as rational as 
the attempt to cure a boil by pounding it with a hammer. The 
one gigantic delusion of the militants is that peace and warfare 
and contentment and happiness can be shot into human beings 
with shrapnel or prodded into them with bayonets. But peace 
and warfare and happiness are plants that do not thrive under 
such culture. The great ones of the earth have been "settling" 
Europe with war and war-bred diplomacy now for some cen- 
turies and we are beholding the crowning success of their policy. 
It is w^orse, of course, than anything which has preceded, be- 
cause the vast improvement that science has made in the instru- 
ments of transportation and the engines of destruction enables 
it to be. The next time — if there is a next time — the havoc 
will be fiercer, because the butchering tools will be deadlier. If 
they can keep up this delusion for another quarter of a century 
and feed the minds of the common people of each nation with 
the hellish suspicion that all the other nations are enemies, all 
bent on their destruction, they may be able to get five or ten 
million more of them to kill one another in the next fell harvest- 
ing. This is the method, hitherto practised, of "settling 
Europe." War is not ended by such devices. 

I think that the world will insist that this war shall be 
ended, not with a comma and a dash, but with a big black period. 
I think that there is gathering in the hearts of the children of 
men, all the world over, a wrath, deep, hot, portentous, against 
the whole system of war, with all its postulates, all its apologies, 
all its devices, — an indignation that will blaze and roar in the 
palaces and the chancelleries and the senate houses until the 
men who shape the policies of nations will be constrained to 
give heed. 

Who will voice this protest? Well, I hope that those whose 
function it is to reprove the sins of the world and to lead men 
away from paths of destruction will not be altogether derelict. 
Those whose responsibility is heaviest have spoken but feebly 
hitherto; let us hope that they will soon find their voices. 

From the artists, the poets, the whole great guild of wit- 
nesses of the light, we hear already some cogent testimonies. 
Never before, I think, in the hour of any great war, has there 
been such a thunderous protest against war as we are hearing 
today. Usually it is the glory of war that the poets sing, while 
the trumpets are sounding and the cannon are booming ; but to- 
day it is the terror, the sorrow, the blight, the brutishness, the 
misery of it all that is stirring men's hearts, and kindling their 
imagination. 

"When I read in the paper," says John Galsworthy, "of 
some glorious charge and the great slaughter of the enemy I 
feel a thrill through every fiber. It is grand, it is splendid ! I 
take a deep breath of joy, almost of rapture. Grand, splendid! 
That there should be lying with their faces haggard to the stars, 
hundreds, thousands of men like myself, better men than my- 
self! Hundreds, thousands who loved life as much as I, felt 
pain as much as I; whose women loved them as much as mine 

35 



love me! Grand, splendid! That the blood should be oozing 
from them into grass that once smelled as sweet to them as it 
does to me. That their eyes, which delighted in sunlight and 
beauty as much as mine should be glazing fast with death ; their 
mouths that mothers and wives and children are aching to kiss 
again should be twisted into gaps of horror. Grand, splendid! 
That other men, no more savage than myself, should have 
strewn them there. Grand, splendid! That in thousands of 
far-off houses women, children and old men will soon be quiv- 
ering with anguished memories of those lying there dead. 

"I thank you, gentle pressmen, romancers, historians — you 
have given me a noble thrill in recounting these glories of 
war." 

The moving pictures, too, will be helping millions to 
realize something of what war means. The cartoonists are get- 
ting in their work. Yes, the world is being made to see, in 
these days, as never before, the background of war's glories. 
And of course that background is tenfold blacker than it ever 
was before. Hitherto it has been only the heroism, the nobility, 
the romance which has been shown; that is all there, and it 
is not to be disparaged; but the black side of it — the awful 
reality behind it all — that has been, for the greater part, kept 
out of sight, and that is an awful wrong. We must know the 
truth of things, and the truth of things is coming to light in 
this war as never before. That is why the whole world is go- 
ing to look at war, before this war is over, with a horror and 
loathing which it never knew before. 

And it is not only the preachers and the poets and the 
artists and the philanthropists who are learning to look at the 
truth and reality of it, but those millions of men who have been 
marching over these bloody fields and lying in these trenches, 
when they are home again are very apt to want to know what 
is the good of it all. They have seen the horror of it, and have 
borne the brunt of it, bravely, no doubt; but they will be ask- 
ing one another, as men never before have asked one another, 
"What is the good of it all? What have we, what has our coun- 
try gained by it? How much better off are we for having lost 
from our side so many hundreds of thousands of our comrades 
and our countrymen, for having put to death so many hundred 
thousands of our brothers of other lands whose right to life 
was just as good as ours? They were not our enemies, and we 
were not theirs. What right had we to kill them ? If any great 
gain to liberty were coming out of all this we might be content, 
but where is the gain? We want to be shown. And we are 
going to know before we go out again on any such business why 
we are going." 

I think that there is likely to be, when these armies are 
disbanded, a good deal of such talk as this in the humble homes 
of the European continent, from which have been drawn the 
millions who have made this war possible. 

And not in the humble homes alone. Multitudes of men 
and women, in all the walks of life, whose livelihood has been 

36 



taken away, whose hearthstones have been broken, whose hearts 
have been torn with anguish, will be asking the same questions : 
"What is the good of it all? What does it mean? Why, in the 
name of all that is sacred, all that is human, why all this waste 
of human life, of all the best gains of human knowledge and skill 
and loving thought, and loving labor? Why? Why? Why? 
This is a reasonable world and we are reasonable beings. We 
want to know the reason of this war? Every one of these 
nations insists, protests, asseverates, that it has been fighting a 
defensive warfare. That to begin with, is the acme of unreason ; 
the whole business is founded on unreason. Each nation im- 
putes to the others its own suspicions and fears and enmities, 
and proceeds to prepare for war, and to make war on that basis. 
That is the fundamental principle on which, hitherto, inter- 
national relations have been governed. The underlying assump- 
tion is that nations are natural enemies. Every nation assumes 
that every other nation is not only a possible but a probable foe ; 
and, therefore, the rulers of every nation proceed to cultivate 
the suspicions and the fears and the enmities of their own 
people toward other nations, and to build up armaments out of 
which nothing but war can come. That is the genesis of war — ■ 
of this war, of most wars. The mainspring of war is the funda- 
mental assumption that nations are natural enemies. It is time 
that this assumption were challenged and expelled from the 
human mind. It is the central delusion of humanity. It is the 
cornerstone of the kingdom of hell. Nations are not natural 
enemies; they are natural allies, neighbors, co-operators. Each 
prospers best by the friendliest relation with all the rest; each 
is vitally interested in the welfare of every other. This is the 
fact, the eternal, immutable, adamantine fact against which 
rulers in their stupidity and madness have forever been knock- 
ing out of their own brains, and the time has come for this idiocy 
to cease. We want no peace made on any such basis. Such 
peace is no peace. We want no peace which merely undertakes 
to equalize enmities, and to put the nation in the best possible 
fighting position for the next outbreak of insanity. We want 
a peace which shall rest on the assumption that nations are 
friends, not enemies ; a peace which shall seek to heal, instead of 
rending; a peace whose avowed motive and purpose it shall be 
to preserve and perpetuate peace, and to make war impossible. 
"Therefore, we want a league — a solemn league and cove- 
nant, in which all the peoples shall be represented, whose busi- 
ness it shall be to make and keep the peace. By this league all 
armaments must be commanded, save those needed by each 
nation to keep the peace within its own borders ; by this league 
all international relations must be controlled. There must be 
no triple alliances nor triple ententes — no combinations offensive 
or defensive of some nations against others, never, never more! 
That would be treason against the peace of the world. We must 
have a peace which is based on the fact of brotherhood ; in which 
each nation joyfully confesses its friendship for all the rest. 
This means, of course that our armaments shall be dismantled, 

37 



or reduced to an international police, and that the great re- 
sources of the people now wasted in war shall be devoted to the 
arts of peace. 

"This is what we, the people demand, we have the power 
to enforce our demand and we shall enforce it, and it will be a 
dangerous thing for the men in the high places to shut their 
ears against it." 

Some such voices the men in the high places are sure to 
hear, if they have ears to hear. Will they listen? I am inclined 
to believe that they will have to listen. There will be those 
among them to whom these admonitions will be audible, and to 
whom they will have an ominous sound. And when they sit 
down around the council boards, and gather together the bills 
payable for this banquet of blood, and confront the awful waste 
of their productive energies which they have suffered, and the 
wrecks awaiting repairs, and the crushing burdens which have 
been added to the national debts under which they were already 
staggering, it will be a time for some very sober reflections. 

I can see some grave statesman with blanched cheek and 
furrowed brow standing up among them and speaking after thi* 
manner : 

"The hour is critical ; let us not conceal it from ourselves. 
We are at the parting of the ways. Whither one path 
leads, we know. We have followed its bloody trail for centuries, 
and the end is in plain sight. It leads to national ruin. The 
people were taxed, before the war, in building up armaments 
until the exaction brought blood ; now the debt is doubled. Will 
they carry it ? I do not know. 

"But if these nations keep on in the path they have been 
travelling, the burden will have to be constantly and indefinitely 
increased. Not one of them will dare to stop with its present 
armaments; each one must have more ships, more big guns, 
more fortresses, more soldiers. War is the horse-leech that 
cries. Give! Give! Do you think that these patient multitudes 
are going to endure this? I tell you that they will not. There 
will be labor strikes, insurrections, revolutions ; your bonds will 
be dishonored, your thrones will totter, your governments will 
go down in wreck and ruin. 

"Such is the road on which you have been travelling, and 
such is the end thereof. What is the good of it all ? What shall 
it profit a nation if it gain the whole world and lose itself? Rome 
got the whole world once, and what became of Rome? You 
think you have made some gains out of this war, but what are 
they worth compared with your losses? Are they any compen- 
sation for the misery you have inflicted, for the havoc you have 
wrought, for the desolations you have made, for the dulling of 
the finer intellects of your people, for the millstone you have 
bound upon the neck of the nation? Look behind you! Look 
ahead ! Do you dare to go on ? 

"I tell you that the time has come for the earth to rid her- 
self of this madness. We are at the parting of the ways. The 

38 



path of peace lies open before us. It is our only escape from 
doom. 

"What is the first step in the way of safety? It is the 
simple recognition of the truth that nations are not natural 
enemies ; that they are natural friends. It is to trample under 
our feet, as the spawn of hell, the doctrine on which interna- 
tional relations have so long been grounded, the doctrine so 
explicitly stated by one whose teachings are in good part the 
inspiration of this war, that, 'It is a persistent struggle for pos- 
session, power and sovereignty which primarily governs the 
relations of one nation to another, and right is respected only 
so far as it is compatible with advantage.' That doctrine will 
keep the world at war until the nations have devoured one 
another, until all that the world has won out of primeval bar- 
barism has been blotted out. It is the essence of all falsehood; 
it is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit of humanity. 

"The nations are not enemies. What quarrel have the 
people of France, of Germany, of Austria, of England, of 
Russia, one with another? They are not enemies. They are 
learning to work together for the common welfare. They are 
exchanging their products, sharing their traditions, mingling 
their lives. We have enticed them into war by making them 
believe that the other nations were conspiring against them, 
to oppress and enslave them. It was a lie, and many of them 
know it now, more will know it before long. We are not going 
to fool them much longer. They are coming to understand that 
people ought to be friends; that their worst enemies are those 
who set them to fighting each other. Woe to us, the men in high 
places, if we are found standing under that gathering storm of 
the people's wrath. 

"We have got to clear our heads of this age-long insanity 
and confess the truth that God has made of one blood all peoples 
that dwell upon the earth to live together as brothers, to study 
the things that make for peace and the things whereby they may 
edify one another; to prepare the ways of peace, to form the 
compacts that shall ensure peace; to put away from us the 
weapons of war, and the suspicions and fears and enmities that 
breed war; to usher in the dawn of that day so long expected, 
when nations shall learn war no more." 

I think that when, after this carnage is checked, the repre- 
sentatives of the nations shall assemble to consider what must 
be done, voices will be heard speaking in this tenor, and that 
they will be commanding voices, convincing voices, and it will be 
necessary to heed them. And when the truth which they utter 
shall be accepted, then and not till then shall we see the end 
of war. 

My belief that it will be accepted and that ere long rests on 
my immovable conviction that light is safer than darkness, that 

39 



love is better than hate, that reason is clearer than unreason, 
and that God is stronger than the devil. If these things are so 
then the world must turn before long from the ways of war into 
the paths of peace, and I do not think it a visionary hope that 
even this stupid, blundering, blind old world will get its eyes 
open to see, before it goes much further on its road, that the 
turning point has come. 



40 



Get a Ne\Y Idea 



From that time Jesus began to preach and to say, Repent ye, 
for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand. — Matt. IV : 17. 
In the preceding chapter we read of the first appearance 
of John the Baptist, known as the forerunner of the Christ, — 
and his first words were, "Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven 
is at hand." Thus it appears that the Baptist and the Christ 
began their ministry with the same message, and began that 
message with the same word, "Repent ye." 

The meaning of the word they used is hardly conveyed by 
the word. Repent. That suggests to us mainly a penitential 
mood — regret and sorrow for misdoing. The Greek word means 
much more. It suggests a response which is more definite and 
more intellectual. "Change your minds," is the exact transla- 
tion. "Get a new idea!" is the real meaning. It is not primarily 
a call to penitence, though penitence may be involved in the 
process. The change of mind may show us that we have been 
doing wrong, and make us sorry for what we have been doing. 
But the first thing which this call requires of us is an intellectual 
change. It is an admonition to put away the thought which 
now occupies your mind and substitute for it another and more 
appropriate thought. 

When we speak of changing our minds we do not mean that 
we exchange our present mental apparatus for some other, but 
that we change the operation of our mental powers; that we 
arrest the processes which are now going on and set our minds 
at work in some other way. 

Changing our mind is apt also to suggest the existence of 
a mental operation which has been continuous and more or less 
habitual, but which has been interrupted, and something differ- 
ent has been substituted for it. When I say that I have changed 
my mind about going to Chicago, you understand that I have 
had a plan to go, but have given it up. But the plan was the 
product of an idea, and was abandoned because some other idea 
had taken possession of my mind. When I say that I have 
changed my mind about studying law, you understand that I 
had been entertaining that purpose and have abandoned it. But 
it must have been because I had got a new idea of what was best 
for me. 

Some people assume and seem to teach that feeling or emo- 
tion is the basis of all action, but, in all practical matters that is 
rather absurd. I couldn't have any sane feeling about going to 
Chicago or not going, unless I had an idea or ideas in my mind 
of what it meant to go to Chicago and what was to be gained or 

41 



lost by going; and I could not have any rational feeling about 
studying law unless I had some ideas about the study of law, 
and of my adaptation to the business. 

These very elementary illustrations enable us to understand 
the force of the injunction, "Change your minds." It strikes at 
the center of our moral life ; it uncovers the source of character. 
For, as Professor Ross says: ''On the whole the virtues grow 
on an intellectual stalk. Right conduct is thought-out conduct. 
Conscience is a way of thinking things." 

It is equally true that most of our vices grow on an intel- 
lectual stalk. Wrong conduct is, to a very large extent, the 
product of wrong ideas. Most of the men and women who are 
living unsocial and injurious lives are doing so because they 
have false or defective ideas of the good of life. 

This principle can be seen working itself out sometimes on 
a tremendous scale, on the scale of a nation. You can see a 
nation — more than one nation, perhaps — getting an exaggerated 
idea of its own importance, and its relation to other nations, 
and filling the earth with slaughter in its attempt to realize its 
ideas. War, as an institution, is the simple and inevitable result 
of the old idea that nations are natural enemies. We shall never 
get rid of it until rulers and people change their minds about 
this, and get the new idea that nations can be and must be 
friends. 

You can see, then, that this injunction may have profound 
meaning and radical consequences. It is not a mere common- 
place of conduct, it is in the primary obligation of life. There 
is none of us who does not need to pay heed to it, though to some 
it has wider application than to others. If a prophet like John 
or a Teacher like Jesus should stand in this place, this morning, 
saying: "Change your minds, for the kingdom of heaven is 
liere," most of you would be constrained to do some sharp and 
serious thinking, and I have no doubt you would quickly discover 
some radical need of such changes. 

But let us try, at first, to see what these words must have 
meant to the people who first listened to them. The small word 
"for" in the text has a very large meaning. "Change your 
minds, for the kingdom of heaven is here." That is the force 
of it. The kingdom of heaven was what these people had been 
thinking of, praying for, waiting for, for many centuries. What 
they meant by it was the restoration of their nation under divine 
leadership to independence and power, and the re-establishment 
of order and justice and prosperity within her borders. The 
more enlightened and spiritually minded among them had come 
to see that such a result could only be attained through national 
righteousness, and they were hoping that the nations round 
about would share in the welfare that was coming to them ; but 
all was connected with their nationality ; the kingdom of heaven 
was to be set up here on these plains of Palestine, and it was 
to be essentially a political institution; out of Zion was to go 
forth the law to the other nations and the word of the Lord from 
Jerusalem. That great rehabilitation of the Jewish nationality 

42 



was the thing they were looking for, but surely it was nowhere 
in sight. Their land was a Roman province, a Roman procura- 
tor sat in the palace on the holy hill of Zion, Roman legionaries 
patrolled their streets, there was no sign of any recovery of their 
power. The kingdom of heaven for which they were looking 
was apparently far in the future. 

And now comes a messenger who bids them change their 
minds, for the Kingdom, of heaven is here. "What can that 
mean? The Kingdom of heaven here, with the Roman eagles 
perching on the gates of Jerusalem, and the Roman legions 
quartered in every city? It will require some radical changes 
of mind before we can realize that." So they might have 
answered. And, indeed, this was exactly what was meant by 
the call of the Master. The truth which He sought to reveal 
to them was simply this, that the Kingdom of heaven is, pri- 
marily, not a geographical or a political fact but a spiritual 
fact, an ethical fact, a social fact; that its seat is in the inward 
parts ; that it rules first our thoughts, our wishes, our purposes ; 
that its law is not enforced by swords and spears. 

The fundamental fact of the Kingdom of heaven is that 
it is the Kingdom of a Father, ruled by one who desires to be 
known as the Father of all men; that all men, therefore, are 
brothers. The fundamental law of this Kingdom is good 
will to all men, friendship for all men. Its obligation is 
summed up in the words, thou shalt love the Lord thy God with 
all thy heart, and thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. And 
your neighbor is any human being, of whatever tribe or clan 
or color, to whom you may be of service. He may be a Philis- 
tine or a Moabite or an Amalekite, he may be a hated Samari- 
tan, he may be a Roman centurioji — anybody to whom you may 
have an opportunity of doing a good turn — he is your neigh- 
bor, he is your brother. 

This is the law of the Kingdom of heaven. And the King- 
dom is here. For the King is here, always here. You have 
no need to seek Him behind palace gates ; enter your own cabin 
and shut the door and He is there; nay, at any moment, in the 
loneliest desert or on the most crowded thoroughfare, you have 
only to breathe a wish and He is with you, "closer than breath- 
ing and nearer than hands or feet." And where the King is 
there the Kingdom must be. Whoever in heart and life seeks 
and purposes to obey the law of the Kingdom, is a citizen of 
the Kingdom, and therefore the Kingdom is not a distant fact 
or a future fact but a present fact. 

Such was the mighty truth conveyed in this, which is, so 
far as we know, the first sentence that fell from the lips of the 
Founder of Christianity — His first utterance, as a public 
teacher. It condenses the message of His Gospel. And we 
can readily understand what a radical change must have been 
required in the minds of those who should intelligently accept 
it. There were, no doubt, some of those who first listened to 
it who had had some glimpses of the spiritual nature of the 
Kingdom, but to most of them it must have been a startling 

43 



novelty. And the statement that the Kingdom was already 
present was a new idea, the newest and perhaps the most diffi- 
cult to entertain that had ever knocked at the doors of their 
intelligence. To take it in and make it at home in their 
customary thinking would be a revolutionary procedure. 

"God the universal Father, to whom all nations and tribes 
are equally dear" — could they find room in their thought for 
that idea? Oh no. To be sure they had come to the belief 
that there was but one God, and that all these Gentiles must 
owe their existence to Him. He was their Creator, and in that 
sense their Father; they had got as far as that; but that He 
could have any real paternal relations with any but the Jews 
they could not for one moment believe. The only way in v/hich 
God could ever become a real Father to any Gentile was by 
his first becoming a Jew; then he would be an adopted child 
and would receive a Father's love and care — only then! 

And brothers — what? These Syrians on the north, these 
Egyptians and Ethiopians on the south, these Phoenicians, 
these Romans — all these uncircumcised hordes — brothers? It 
is impossible ! Nay, it is the very essence of irreligion to think 
of such a thing. 

Some such response must have been made by most of those 
who heard these first sermons of Jesus and understood what 
they meant. The change in their minds which the conception 
required was too radical for them. They couldn't get the new 
idea. It was too large for their minds. 

I wonder how many even of those who became His disciples 
and attached themselves to Him ever got the new idea. Some 
parts of it they did get, I am sure. They got the idea that God 
was their Father, and thus they came into filial relations with 
Him. They got the idea that He was their Friend, and they 
learned to trust Him and found comfort and strength in that 
new and dear personal fellowship with Him into which Jesus 
led them. That was a great gain for them ; religion had a new 
meaning to them, and some of them spent their lives in trying 
to bring men into the same blessed personal experience. 

But very few of them, I think, ever got hold of the new 
and great idea that God is the Father of all men, and that there- 
fore all men are brothers. For when Jesus passed beyond their 
sight and these apostles who were scattered abroad by the per- 
secutions in Jerusalem went everywhere preaching the word, 
did they begin to preach this gospel of the Kingdom — this doc- 
trine that God is the universal Father, and that all men are 
brothers? By no means. They wanted to convert all men to 
Christianity, of course ; but they insisted that the Gentiles must 
first be converted to Judaism before they could be Christians. 
They did not propose to admit to their fellowship any but native 
or naturalized Jews. This was true of the men who had been 
the companions of Jesus in all His ministry. So imperfectly 
had they grasped the central truth of Christ's Gospel. So 
utterly had they failed to get the great new idea which Jesus 
came to bring to men! It was not until Paul, who was bom 

44 



outside of Palestine, who never knew Christ, and who had 
gained much of his education in a Greek city, had got hold of 
the message of Jesus that the real meaning of it was enforced, 
and the doctrine of the Kingdom was widened enough to let the 
Gentiles directly into the Church without forcing them to go 
through the portals of Judaism. That was what Paul did for 
the Church, and it was much — it was a great gift; rightly has 
it been said that he was the greatest reformer that the Church 
has ever known. Through this partial recovery of the meaning 
of Jesus it has been possible for the Church to enter all coun- 
tries and tribes and to make converts in them all. And of 
course it has been an article of faith that men of all nations and 
tongues, when converted and baptized, brought together in the 
Church, were brothers. 

But this, after all, is but a small part of what Jesus meant 
by the Gospel of the Kingdom. His Gospel was that all men 
are brothers, not may be; converted or unconverted, baptized 
or unbaptized, inside your national boundaries or outside of 
them; whether they speak your language or a language you 
cannot understand; whether they are of your color or some 
other color — all are the children of one Father, and all are 
brothers. That truth has never yet been heartily believed or 
consistently taught by the organizations that claim to be Chris- 
tian churches. If anything is central in Christianity this is. 
Has it been made central in the teaching of Christianity during 
the nineteen centuries of its history? Not by any means. 
Look at the historic creeds. They are supposed to express the 
truths which are central and essential. What have they to say 
about the universal Fatherhood of God and the universal 
brotherhood of man? Not much. The Apostles' Creed and the 
Nicene Creed both confess faith in "God the Father Almighty," 
maker of heaven and earth; His creatorship they acknowledge, 
but they have no hint of His universal paternal relation, and 
not a suggestion of the brotherhood of all His children. Is 
there anything about these central truths of Fatherhood 
and Brotherhood in the thirty-nine articles of the Anglican 
Church? Not a word. Is there any clear statement of them 
in the Westminster Confession of the Presbyterian Church, or 
the Savoy Confession of the Congregationalists ? No. These 
ancient symbols are concerned about other things. They could 
not emphasize this doctrine of the Universal Fatherhood, for 
by their doctrine of the fall of man the fact of fatherhood was 
canceled; all men by the sin of Adam had become alienated 
from God and were under His wrath and curse; He was their 
Creator and they were His creatures, but there could be no 
paternal or filial relations between them until they were regen- 
erated. They had to be adopted, before they could be His 
children. How could this central truth of the Gospel of the 
Kingdom be preached or taught by those who consistently held 
such beliefs? They could not be, and they have not been. The 
preachers, the great evangelists have not been proclaiming, 
through these nineteen centuries, the doctrines of the universal 

45 



Fatherhood of God and the universal Brotherhood of man. 
That has not been their message. They have been saying that 
God was willing to be the Father of those who would repent 
and believe; that only those could claim His Fatherhood. To 
those within the Church and to all the regenerate, within or 
without the Church He was a Father — the rest were aliens to 
His Kingdom, disinherited children with no claim upon His 
mercy. 

Of course there have always been those who, in spite of 
the dogmas, believed in the Fatherhood. Parents have taught 
their unconverted children to say the Lord's Prayer, though, 
logically, they had no right to say it. How could they speak of 
God as their Father when they knew that He had repudiated 
the fatherly relation? But multitudes have clung to the fact, 
ignoring the theory, and so the truth of the Fatherhood has 
always had a home in the hearts of men. It was very incon- 
sistent in them, no doubt; but I say again, Bless God for the 
inconsistencies of the Christian faith ! Are we not saved, pretty 
largely, by our inconsistencies? Was not that what Tennyson 
meant when he said, 

"There lives more faith in honest doubt. 
Believe me, than in half the creeds." 

I am sure that millions and millions of our fellow men have 
been made better men by believing for themselves and for their 
children in the Fatherhood in which, by their creeds, they had 
no right to believe, than they would have been if they had 
followed their logic to its bitter conclusion. 

But, as a rule, through the Christian centuries, the doc- 
trine preached and taught has not been the doctrine of the 
universal Fatherhood of God. Some few have preached it, in 
all the ages, and, during the last hundred years a steadily grow- 
ing number have got firm hold of it and have declared it with 
conviction and passion. But these have generally been re- 
garded as heretics, and the Gospel of the Kingdom as Jesus 
preached it has not, by the generality of preachers, been pro- 
claimed as the central message of the Christian Church. Indeed 
it is quite the custom of those who are regarded as the great 
expounders of what is known as "the good old Gospel" to hold 
this Gospel of the Kingdom up to scorn, to denounce it as infi- 
delity ; and some of you have heard, here in Columbus, one who 
is acclaimed as the greatest evangelist since the day of Pente- 
cost, declaring in these words that "the doctrine of the Father- 
hood of God and the brotherhood of man is the worst rot that 
was ever dug out of hell and that every man who preaches it 
is a liar." Not many preachers hate the doctrine like that, but 
there are many who have no use for it. 

Instead of being told that the Kingdom is here, we have 
been hearing that it is coming by and by, in the millennium, 
perhaps a thousand years from now. Instead of learning that 
God is the Father of all men, we have been taught that He is 
now only the ruler and judge and punisher of the vast mass 
of mankind, that He is the Father only of the converted people. 

46 



Instead of coming to think that all men are brothers and must 
behave brotherly we have been instructed that all men are by 
nature enemies and haters of one another; that as members of 
a depraved race nothing else can be expected of them; that 
those who are shut out from the benefits of the divine Father- 
hood cannot, of course, be required to cultivate the virtues of 
the human brotherhood; and that, therefore, outside of the 
society of the regenerate, the world may be expected to be a 
scene of strife and conflict. 

"According to your faith be it unto you" — that is the law. 
If that is the best your religion has to offer men, you will know 
what to look for. They will certainly be no better than their 
religious theory requires them to be. If men are taught to 
expect that their neighbors will all be as selfish and greedy as 
they dare to be, all will be suspecting one another, watching 
against one another, getting ready to take advantage of one 
another when the opportunity comes. Of course they soon find 
out that such conditions bring pandemonium in any human 
society and they are forced, in self-defense, to cultivate in their 
own neighborhoods relations of good will and confidence — 
forced to exercise virtues of which by their theology they are 
incapable. Once more they are saved by their inconsistencies. 

But enough of the poison of the bad doctrine is still left 
in them to justify no end of selfishnesses and malignities, and to 
keep the human race boiling with strife and conflict. This is 
what the world has been taught to expect of itself, and the 
world sees to it that the expectation is not wholly disappointed. 

Especially does this malign expectation find full room to 
work itself out in what Bemhardi calls the "extra-social strug- 
gle," when international policies are being shaped. Here the 
theory that men are by nature antagonists rather than asso- 
ciates, and haters rather than lovers is given free course. Thus 
theology warrants the rulers of all states in believing that the 
people of all other states are their enemies. This is the logical 
and inevitable deduction from the doctrine of human depravity. 
Fraternity is unnatural to unconverted men, and most of the 
inhabitants of all these states are unconverted. Their natural 
relation to each other is therefore that of ill-will. Each may 
be expected to attack and overpower the others whenever it 
believes itself able to do so. That is what is to be predicated 
of unconverted human nature. So the theologians say, and the 
rulers, of course, get their notions about human nature largely 
from the theologians. So every nation is watching against 
every other nation, cultivating in its own heart the resentments 
which spring from its suspicions, building the armaments by 
which it makes ready for the war in which all these enmities 
must culminate. 

Is it not pitiful, is it not tragical that the Church which 
bears the name of Jesus Christ should have produced a theory 
of human nature which lends itself to such uses as that? 

Was this what Jesus meant when he bade them change 
their m.inds because the Kingdom of heaven had come? Was 

47 



this the new idea which He wanted them to get? No; they had 
this idea already. What He wanted them to believe was that 
God was the Father of all men, and that all men were brothers. 
It would have required a great change in their minds to grasp 
this idea, no doubt; but this was the call He made upon them. 
I do not suppose that He expected the whole world to grasp 
it at once, but I think that He hoped that a few would get the 
new idea and would cling to it, and lift it up and keep it alive 
and live by it, and make the world believe in it. 

I do not think that He is disappointed today. For a few 
have always believed in it and kept it alive; and more people 
believe in it today — many more than ever before in all the cen- 
turies. But how long it has taken the world to get this simple 
idea, that we all have one Father, and that we are all brothers. 
Dimly, dimly it has been shining through all these centuries; 
and now and then it has flamed out in a great sermon or a great 
picture or a great poem that sent a thrill through the heart of 
humanity; but still its brightness has been veiled, and its music 
has been drowned in the clamor of the world's strife, so that 
all throug-li these Christian centuries men — these brothers! — 
have been enslaving and exploiting one another in field and 
mine and factory; and sharpening swords, and forging cannon 
and building battleships and mixing hellish explosives to kill 
one another — these Christian brothers! these Christian broth- 
ers! How feebly, how feebly they have grasped the new idea! 

Suppose that all those who have called themselves Chris- 
tians had really grasped the new idea. Suppose that the theo- 
logians had seized it, and made it the center and soul of all 
their teaching — that one is our Father — the God and Father 
of our Lord Jesus Christ, whose life and death reveals Him; 
and that we are ail brothers — men of every hue, of every clime, 
of every tongue — all brothers; no foreigners, no strangers, no 
foes — all brothers; and that the Kingdom of heaven is here, 
the Kingdom of friendship and good will — here, to possess the 
earth and to gather into itself all nations and tribes and con- 
tinents and islands; suppose they had emblazoned this on their 
banners and carved it upon their altars, and made it the theme 
of their anthems, and organized their whole Church life around 
it; and suppose that the whole Church had concentrated its 
energies on making these truths of Fatherhood and brotherhood 
vital and effective; insisting that no man could be a Christian 
who doubted them ; that the one deadly infidelity was the denial 
of them ; suppose that the nineteen Christian centuries had been 
devoted to the enforcement of these central truths of Chris- 
tianity, should we not be living in a very different world from 
that in which we are living today? In a world in which these 
truths had been made real and vital by the passionate conviction 
and the heroic and devoted living of hundreds of millions of 
Christian confessors, could any such things be taking place as 
those which we are witnessing today? 

It is not too late, I trust, for Christendom to get the new 
idea — the new idea which Jesus besought it to accept nineteen 

48 



centuries ago — and to make it central and commanding in the 
life of the world. That it should be, to so many, a new idea 
today, is an astounding fact. But it is an idea, thank God, that 
can never grow old, any more than sunlight and rain or seed- 
time and harvest can go out of fashion. If we have spent a 
good many generations in planting chaff or nettle seed, that is 
no reason why we should not today accept the good seed and 
sow it beside all waters. The kindly earth will nourish it and 
the sunshine and the rain will ripen it, and we may see a harvest 
growing which shall make glad the heart of man. 

Surely the old world is calling, with all its voices of horror 
and woe and agony, for some new idea on which to rebuild its 
shattered civilization. The old foundations of rivalry and 
strife, of distrust and antipathy on which it has been seeking 
to rest its structures of art and industry are crumbling; some 
new principle must be discovered on which to found human 
relations. Is not the first word that Jesus spoke the word that 
the world needs now to hear? Is anything more needed to 
make an end of this horror and to put this madness out of the 
world, than that the rulers and the peoples should change their 
minds about nations being naturally hostile, and should get the 
new idea that nations are naturally friendly, since all the people 
of all the nations have one Father and all are of one family? 
If that is the fact then the first thing they have to do is to come 
together and make a compact which shall recognize and express 
that fact. 

Is it not an impressive circumstance that the thought of 
the whole world seems to be moving steadily and strongly in 
this direction? I have read a good many discussions of what 
is to come after the war, and the way out, and a great con- 
sensus of opinion seems to be gathering that there can be no 
way out except some kind of league of peace, which shall pave 
the way for the parliament of man, the federation of the world. 
What would have been sneered at six months ago, by the great 
majority, as utterly Utopian, begins to be recognized by a good 
share of the people who think, as the only possible cure for the 
world's woe. 

When the day comes, as come it must ere long, that the 
great ones of the earth get ready to make the principle of 
brotherhood the corner-stone of a universal commonwealth, it 
will perhaps be plain to all the world that Christianity is not 
a failure. And it may perhaps be more evident by that time 
that the Church which bears the name of Jesus Christ can find 
no better foundation for its life and teaching than the Gospel 
of the Kingdom. 

Dec. 27, 1914. 



49 



The Church and Peace 



Men and brethren, what shall we do ? — Acts II : 37. 

The modern peace movement is less than a hundred years 
old. There have been advocates of peace, arguments for peace 
in all the centuries and much of their inspiration has come from 
the teachings of Jesus and from the New Testament. But it 
remains a shameful fact, not only that organized Christianity 
has never in any consistent and concerted way arrayed itself 
against war, but that no organized effort was made outside the 
Church to put an end to war until the beginning of the nine- 
teenth century. For eighteen centuries the Church which bears 
the name of Jesus Christ has been either tacitly assenting to 
war, or making apology for it, or taking part in it. It has not 
so instructed and influenced the public opinion of the Christian 
nations that they have seriously sought for some method of 
settling international difficulties without fighting. It is only 
within the last hundred years that the Christian people of the 
various Christian nations have earnestly turned their attention 
to this problem of peace. 

That the life and teachings of Jesus Christ as contained 
in the New Testament have had much to do in turning their 
thought in this direction cannot be doubted. This is one of 
the sources from which the modern peace movement has arisen. 
But it is not the only source. 

"The Modern Peace Movement," says Dr. Gilbert, "is a 
deep and powerful river formed by the union of a number of 
differing streams. Only one of these confluent tributaries has 
its immediate origin in the Gospel. Others proceed from 
springs unlike that and also more or less unlike each other." 

The Modern Peace Government finds its spring in part in 
economic facts and forces. The vast improvement in the 
means of intercommunication, the diversification of industries 
and the facilitation of exchanges have brought all nations into 
profitable commercial intercourse; we are exchanging, with 
great advantage, the products of our enterprises; we are be- 
coming interdependent, and the reason why these relations 
should be free and uninterrupted are numerous and strong. 
War, in any part of the world, checks or embarrasses these com- 
mercial movements, and such a war as the present not only 
paralyzes the industries of the people taking part in it but 
causes the greatest inconvenience and loss to all the other civil- 
ized nations. There are very powerful business reasons, there- 
fore, why the world should put an end to war. Nor can these 
be dismissed as merely sordid and materialistic considerations. 
For the losses and sufferings which even the neutral nations 
must suffer in a great war, are borne not only by the traders, 

50 



they fall heavily on multitudes of laborers and employes. The 
closing of foreign markets to our products takes the bread out 
of the mouths of our own working people. There are a good 
many little children in Columbus who have had less than they 
needed to eat today because of what is going on in France and 
Poland. 

These economic considerations are coming to have increas- 
ing weight in determining questions of peace or war, and they 
ought to have. The frightful expensiveness of war is a fact 
which must be weighed. The applications of modern science to 
the arts of destruction not only enormously enhance the cost 
of the preparations for war, but they render war proportion- 
ately more destructive, both of life and of property. It is this 
terrific cost of modern war which M. de Bloch figured out so 
appallingly in his book on War, the reading of which it is said, 
induced the Czar to call the first Peace Conference. 

The national debts, mostly due to war, have been mount- 
ing higher and higher year after year, until they have become 
an almost intolerable load upon our industries. More than two- 
thirds of all the money raised by the United States Govern- 
ment, in direct and indirect taxation, goes for past or future 
wars. This war, of course, will add immensely to the debts 
of all the European countries — how much no man can tell, and 
the taxes will be a crushing burden upon all classes, but espe- 
cially upon the wage-workers. Well may the people of all the 
nations demand to be shown what benefit they are receiving 
from all this enormous outlay of life and treasure. 

Another of the springs of the Peace Movement is in the 
humanitarian sentiment which has grown so wonderfully dur- 
ing the last century. The horror of war, the suffering which 
it brings, the butchery and carnage, the maiming of so many 
lives, the desolation and poverty of so many households — all 
these are being realized, as never before, by the masses of the 
people, and they cause a revolt against war which is wide-spread 
and passionate. 

And the moral revolt is no less significant. "War," says 
Dr. Gilbert, "is cruel and pitiless. The joy of the present and 
hope of the future disappear in its bloody maw. The wheels 
of progress are blocked, sometimes for generations. War piles 
up debts for the children and grandchildren of those who fall 
on the field. War exalts types of character which are rela- 
tively low, qualities especially suited to the work of destruc- 
tion. Wars produce dictators and despots, clever maneuverers 
of armies and bold fighters — Joshuas and Davids, it may be, 
but oftener a Periander, a Clovis, a Richard III, a John, a 
Tilly, an Alva — but they do not produce great educators and 
inventors, great philanthropists and artists, great poets and 
prophets, or simply plain, good men."* 

All these reasons for peace — the economic reasons, the hu- 
manitarian reasons, the moral reasons — may be regarded as 



*The Bible and Universal Peace, p. 213. 

51 



distinct from the influences which have been set in motion by 
the Church. At least it is true that there are many earnest 
advocates of peace who are not in the churches, and not in 
close sympathy with them, to whom these considerations most 
strongly appeal. It might be plausibly urged that these hu- 
manitarians and these moralists have gained the largest part 
of their inspiration from the New Testament, but that point 
may be waived. It is sufficient to recognize the fact that strong 
influences are at work in behalf of peace which are not distinctly 
and consciously religious influences. The churches must rec- 
ognize these and use them, to the fullest extent. The economic 
forces and the humanitarian forces and the moral forces are 
all parts of the Kingdom of God, and it is the business of the 
Church to discern and promote every interest of that Kingdom. 

The churches are not, then, called to monopolize the in- 
fluences which make for peace nor to assume an exclusive lead- 
ership of the modem peace movement. But the Church of Jesus 
Christ certainly has a responsibility in this matter which she 
cannot disregard. That the Kingdom which Jesus Christ 
meant to establish in the world is a Kingdom of peace cannot 
be disputed. That a large part of the business of the Church 
which claims to represent Him must be the prevention of war 
and the promotion of peace is equally clear. That organized 
Christianity has utterly failed in this task is quite too plain. 
That the present horrible conditions are largely due to this 
failure must be sorrowfully confessed. And therefore the pres- 
ent war is at once such an arraignment of the Church for its 
dereliction, and such a trumpet call to bestir itself and grapple 
with the neglected duty as the Church has never before heard in 
all its history. If this war does not convict the Church of sin, 
and "stab its spirit broad awake," it is doubtful whether any-^ 
thing will ever do it. And it would seem as thousrh this sense 
of shame and humiliation, this passionate desire to make 
amends for past neglect should stir organized Christendom to 
its depths, and we should hear in every assembly of disciples 
the cry that was heard at Pentecost, "Men and brethren, what 
shall we do?" 

The first thing to do is to recognize not only the responsi- 
bility of the Church but its power to meet its obligation. The 
Church can put an end to war, whenever it addresses itself 
seriously to that task. Within ten years the Christian Church 
could make any sreneral or serious war a moral impossibility. 
The words that follow, by Dr. Charles Holley Gilbert, do not 
overstate the truth concerning the Church: 

"It holds in Christendom the balance of power between 
v/ar and peace. One may safely go further, and say that the 
clergy hold the balance of power. For, consider their influence 
a moment. The clergy of the United States number approxi- 
mately 175,000, and there are, perhaps, about three times as 
many in Europe, exclusive of Russia, 700,000 in all.* These 



* But why "exclusive of Russia"? Are not the clergy of the Greek 
Church equally under obligation to preach peace? 

52 



men as a class have that authority which flows from a thorough 
education, they have the prestige of representing a religion 
that has surpassed all others in its power to uplift humanity, 
and they have the unique personal influence that springs from 
a ministry to men in the vital matters of the soul and in the 
most sacred events of the outward life. These 700,000 Chris- 
tian ministers have an opportunity to determine the ideals of 
perhaps twenty millions of boys and girls whom they have 
consecrated to the God of peace in baptism. 

"Moreover, this great host of ministers who are pledged 
to preach the Gospel would have, in the advocacy of peace, 
almost the unanimous support of the women of the Church, 
probably not less than fifty millions, as well as the support of 
a majority of those women of Christian lands who are not in 
the Church, and they would also be upheld by a number of men 
within the Church, which, if not as large as the number of 
women, would, nevertheless, be many times as large as the 
army of Xerxes, while a multitude of men outside the Church 
are ready for a leadership of peace. 

"Upon these 700,000 ministers of the Gospel rests a pecu- 
liarly solemn responsibility for the peace of the world. They 
are, of all men, best acquainted with the teaching of Jesus, and 
it is their sole business in life to enforce that teaching. 
Granted that they do not agree on the question whether the 
Bible ever sanctions war, they must agree, if they read the 
Bible intelligently and without the fear of man, that Jesus laid 
supreme emphasis on the attainment of qualities of character 
which render war increasingly impossible, and they must agree 
that the spirit of Jesus would try every suggestion of brotherly 
love before it would ever consider a resort to the dread arbitra- 
ment of war."* 

The force is in the field. There is no need of any addi' 
tional organization, no funds are called for ; it is only necessary 
that these ministers of the Gospel of peace should stand in 
the places where they are called to stand and preach the word 
they have been bidden to preach. They can very well afford 
to leave on one side a good many of the topics which have 
hitherto occupied most of their thought, until they have given 
the Gospel of the Kingdom the place that belongs to it — until 
they have made men believe that the Kingdom of the Father is 
here, and that it brings the whole world into one brotherhood. 
Seven hundred thousand preachers with their hearts on fire 
with this truth, would create an atmosphere in which war would 
not live very long. 

This is the great thing to do, the first thing to do. To open 
the minds of men to this central truth of the unity of human- 
kind — that there is but one Father, and that we are all 
brothers, this is the one essential thing in the preparation for 
universal peace. It is not by legal machinery, it is not by politi- 
cal methods that this great good will be secured. Something 



*The Bible and Universal Peace, pp. 203-4. 

53 



may be done, it is true, by the provision of fitting forms through 
which the spirit of peace may find expression. The labor of 
men like Grotius in framing the principles of international law 
is not wasted. The organization of courts of arbitration and 
Hague Tribunals is of great service. Such work is often derided, 
because it does not give in at once the entire result for which 
we are looking, but the derision misses its mark. It helps to 
guide the thoughts of men toward the good which the future 
will bring. 

Yet the great need is not so much the machinery of peace, 
as the conviction of the oneness of all people, the faith in 
brotherhood, the spirit of brotherhood; and that is an essen- 
tially religious conviction; it springs from deeper sources than 
any which can be opened in our legal tribunals. 

"The peace between men," says Dr. Gilbert, "which is the 
reflex of the brotherhood of man, is not a thing that treaties can 
either produce or guard. It has no need of courts of arbitration, 
no need of international police. Where Jesus' ideal of brother- 
hood is realized, there peace is indestructible. The peace of 
brotherhood is, in the thought of Jesus, a religious state. It is 
not from beneath, but from above. The sun, whose warmth 
produces the feeling of brotherliness and so creates peace, is the 
Father in heaven. From fatherliness flows brotherliness and 
from brotherliness peace. The guarantee of peace is as strong 
as the bond of faith, and the strength of faith is in proportion 
to its realization of the Fatherhood of God. Any community or 
group of communities, small or large, in which religion means 
simply love of God and godly love of man has peace." * 

Are we demanding too much when we demand that the 
church shall make religion mean this, in every community in 
which it is planted? And does not every man know that when 
religion does mean this, war will be at an end? 

Wise statesmen and diplomats who have unlearned the 
devilish tradition of universal enmity and have got the new idea 
that peace is best secured, not by the alligation of hatreds, but by 
the commingling of interests and services, will soon be at work 
upon plans by which the conflicting claims of these contending 
peoples may be adjusted. It is impossible to predict, at this junc- 
ture, what shape the problem will assume when it is presented 
to that Congress of the Powers which will by and by be called 
to work it out. Many devices are already suggested but most 
of them are likely to be superannuated before the war is over. 
The churches ought to be able to lend valuable aid in all these 
negotiations. They ought to influence greatly the choice of the 
men by whom these negotiations will be conducted. They ought 
to watch, vigilantly, the selection of the representatives of the 
several nations in the Congress, and see that men are secured 
who believe in peace. 

But the great business of the churches will be to awaken and 
diffuse the sentiment of brotherhood, the faith in peace, the hope 



^The Bible and Universal Peace, pp. 209-10. 

54 



for peace, the love of peace. They are the power-houses in which 
the current must be generated which will illuminate the discus- 
sions of the peace congress and light up the way in which the 
nations shall walk into the glory of the new day. 

And what a glorious task it is to which the churches in this 
juncture are summoned. To put an end to this age long curse 
and misery; to roll back the tides of carnage and slaughter 
which have been sweeping over the centuries; to banish the 
shadow that has long been darkening the homes of men and 
lift the burden which is always crushing the toilers ; to kindle in 
the hearts of men new hope for the coming of a brighter day; 
to comfort the farmer as he sows his seed with the assurance 
that his fields will not be rutted by cannon and ploughed by 
shells before the harvest is ripe; to assure the mother as she 
sings by the cradle that her baby boy will not be dragged forth 
before he is grown to be shot in the trenches ; to make men see 
that the great expectation of a reign of good will which the 
world has been cherishing for centuries is not an illusion; that 
it is here, waiting on the threshold of the time, and that noth- 
ing is wanting to its full dominion but that men should make 
room in their hearts for the spirit of brotherhood; — ^to fill the 
world with this great gladness — this is the task to which the 
Church of this day is summoned. What a high calling it is ! what 
a splendid mission! 

And nobody will question or cavil. Her right to do this work 
will be joyfully conceded by all— believers or unbelievers; the 
blessings of all the children of men will rest upon her as she 
goes forth to preach to all the nations the Gospel of peace. And 
if, by this clear witnessing she shall succeed in awakening in 
the hearts of multitudes a great faith in the reality of brother- 
hood, and in moving them to demand that the new international 
bond shall be woven, not of suspicion and hate, but of trust and 
good will, what a glory she will win for herself; how greatly 
will her honor be exalted and her influence extended ! 

Who cannot see that the hour has come — the hour of 
opportunity — for the Church of the living God? The tide is 
flowing which taken at its flood, will restore her losses and 
replenish her waning strength and bear her forward to the 
leadership that belongs to her. And from the memories of 
the past, and the needs of a mighty future and a great cloud 
of witnesses overhead comes the arousing call: Zion that 
bringest good tidings, get thee up into the high mountain; 
Jerusalem that bringest good tidings, lift up thy voice with 
strength; lift it up, be not afraid; say unto all the nations of 
the earth: Behold the Kingdom is here; the Kingdom of good- 
will, the Kingdom of brotherhood ; mightier to rule than all your 
kingdoms of force and fear. The King of love your Shepherd 
is; Bow down before Him, ye nations, and hearken ye peo- 
ples; His way of good will is the only way; walk ye in it and 
be at peace! 

If only the Church of God could know that her hour is 
come, and could grasp the occasion ! If there are angels watch- 

55 



ing overhead what is going on upon the earth, I wonder what 
they are saying about the Christian Church and her opportunity. 
For this splendid enterprise she needs no special warrant, 
no period of preparation, no additional equipment, no new 
machinery. No church needs to wait for other churches; all 
it has to do is to kindle in the hearts of its own members and 
of its neighbors the passion of universal brotherhood; to fill 
its own community with the sense of the reality of the Kingdom 
of heaven on the earth. 

Any local church, any company of believers, on the avenue 
or in the suburb, can begin at once to tell the glad tidings. You 
don't require any elaborate outfit of dogma, nor any cumber- 
some ritual, to enable you to express it; in fact you can't ex- 
press it at all unless you put those things decisively behind 
you. Your preaching will not be convincing unless you believe 
your message, and put your life into it; unless you are sure 
that it is the one truth that the world needs to hear. The 
Gospel of the Kingdom must be preached as the Crusades were 
preached, by men whose souls are on fire. It must be put 
where Jesus put it at the front of the message; it must not 
be the postscript of dissertations on doctrinal schemes of j^al- 
vation, or sacramental substitutes for character ; it must occupy 
the center of the stage and be made to blaze in the light of 
great convictions. 

It will not, of course, be possible to enforce this truth of 
brotherhood upon the nations without discovering that it has 
many applications nearer home. When once we set out to make 
it the international bond we shall soon be made aware that its 
principle is no less binding on social classes and on all associa- 
tions of human beings, and we shall find our Gospel of the 
Kingdom broadening and deepening, and our message gaining 
in significance. It would be strange indeed if the revisions of 
international morality which this war is compelling, did not 
react mightily upon our common social and civic morality, and 
show us what crying needs there are for the Christianizing of 
the mine and the factory and the counting room and the home, 
as well as the foreign office. This tremendous shaking of the 
foundations of our civilization will have but a lame and im- 
potent conclusion if it does not make us see that the same bad 
principles, which have brought down upon us this cataclysm, 
are operating in all our social life with consequences less spec- 
tacular but no less malign. We shall hardly succeed in making 
the principle of brotherhood regnant between the nations unless 
at the same time we lift it up and crown it within the nations. 

But all this is quite within the power of the Christian 
Church. The principle on which it is founded is clear as the 
daylight. There is no room for doubting as to what Jesus 
meant that His Church should be and what He meant that it 
should teach. If the truth which He made central has been 
slurred and disparaged, and if, in consequence of that infidelity, 
vast calamities are visited upon the earth, there is surely some 
reason why that truth should be recovered and made what He 

56 



meant it to be, the head-stone of the corner. This is the su- 
preme obhgation of the Christian Church at this hour. 

And obligation implies ability. What we ought to do we 
can do. These seven hundred thousand ministers can make 
this truth real and regnant, if they believe it. Nay, if one-half 
or one-third of them would get the new idea of the Kingdom 
as a fire shut up in their bones and would make it the master- 
word of all their teaching, we should soon see conditions which 
would not only make war impossible, but would bring to all 
the disturbed and abnormal conditions of our social life health 
and peace. 

The immediate result of such a revival of Christianity 
should be the creation of a sentiment which would demand a 
League of Peace among the nations. Yet it is probable that, 
to begin with, this League of Peace would be based on the 
assumption of possible wars; it would be intended rather as a 
regulation or mitigation of war than as a substitute for war; 
it would provide for armaments, under certain collective con- 
trol, and would imply war as a possibility. That will be a vast 
gain, but it will not be the solution of the problem. It will be 
a sorry expression, after all, of the fact of brotherhood. It 
will leave in the future the day when nations shall learn war 
no more. The Church will still have a good part of its task 
before it. For an armed League of Peace is, when you come 
to think of it, an absurdity. It sounds like A Council of Liars 
in Aid of Truth, or A Combination of the Powers of Darkness 
to Spread the Light. What need of armaments has a League 
of Peace? 

How hard it is to rid ourselves of the obsessions of mili- 
tarism! Not the Germans alone but all the rest of us are 
militarists. It is bred in our bones. We cannot think in any 
other terms. We cannot conceive of any other ultimate forces 
but those of the material world. But when these militaristic 
obsessions have loosed a little more their grip upon our minds 
we shall be able to see that peace has no need of the implements 
of war; that the way to make and keep the peace is not to pre-i 
pare for war, even by the most remote and indirect processes; 
that the only way to get rid of war, or of any other moral evil, 
is to assume its impossibility. 

What are these armaments with which we propose to pro- 
vide the League of Peace? Not offensive, of course. But if 
they are defensive where are the feared offenders? If all the 
nations engaged in the present war are brought into the League 
of Peace, and joined, as they would surely be, by the United 
States and Italy and Brazil and the Argentines and the other 
South American states, and China — where would be the possible 
enemies against whom such armaments would be needed ? They 
are clung to, of course, because of the misgiving that the nations 
composing the League may fall out among themselves; because 
the bond of brotherhood is not trusted. Peace would not be 
quite secure in any family if it rested on an agreement as to 
the number of revolvers each brother might carry and the 

57 



length of the dirk-blades allowed to each, and was coupled with 
a covenant that no brother would attack any other brother with- 
out first calling a family council. The fact of brotherhood does 
not seem to find adequate expression in such an arrange- 
ment. When we really begin to believe in it, we shall be able 
to dispense with armaments. And there is not much use in 
talking about peace until we are ready to take the principle 
of brotherhood seriously. Either enmity or brotherhood must 
be assumed as the basis of international relations, and there 
can be no compromise between them. Jesus or Bernhardi — 
these are the alternatives before the world rulers, and the names 
will not be bracketed. If the world votes that the law of force 
is supreme, the world must take the consequences. If the world 
is satisfied by the experience through which it is now passing 
that the law of good will is a better ruling principle, then the 
world must adopt it whole-heartedly, and make no provision 
for strife to fulfil the lusts thereof. What we have been hoping 
for is that the world would be so sick of carnage that it would 
be ready to choose the way of Christ. That is a great expecta- 
tion, but I, for one, am quite unable to see that anything less 
will be of permanent value. 

In the last number of the "New Republic" I find two 
thoughtful articles, one of which puts aside Mr. Lowes Dickin- 
son's plan for the restoration of peace with the remark that 
"he is really trusting to a spiritual conversion, to so vast an 
illumination of reason and good will that any plan could be 
worked." It adds, "He is perfectly right. If the world could 
feel and think as he wishes it to, any reform would be possible, 
but no reform would be necessary." And it intimates that all 
such expectations are beyond the bounds of probability. 

The other writer speculates upon the possibility that men 
may return after the war to their old ways of thinking on the 
great themes of the world order, and then asks: "Is it not 
quite as possible that a whole new order of ideas, ideals, per- 
haps a religious awakening, probably a new outburst of national 
spirit and patriotism in all races may come?" 

It is this larger possibility from which I am never able 
to remove my thought. I cannot believe that the world is going 
through this fiery baptism to emerge at the end with the same 
crude notions of social justice and vital religion as those which 
have brought these calamities upon us. So I take my stand 
with Mr. Dickinson and trust to a "spiritual conversion" of 
the ruling thought of the world, and to such an "illumination 
of reason and good will" as this conflagration ought to bring. 
And the Church of Jesus Christ is here to interpret this tragedy, 
and to show the people the way of life and peace. 

Jan. 6, 1915. 



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